Darian DeVries built his first roster as Indiana’s head coach almost entirely through the transfer portal as the remaining members of Mike Woodson’s final team entered the transfer portal and Trent Sisley affirmed his commitment to the program.
Once the dust settled on portal season, a few things became clear about this first group.
- It was built to take plenty of 3-pointers, leaving it equally vulnerable and dangerous depending on how well it shot the ball in a given game
- It was going to have to establish a winning identity immediately
Of Indiana’s ten transfer portal additions, six were entering their final season of collegiate eligibility. Those six ended up forming the bulk of Indiana’s rotation with
two juniors, Nick Dorn and Jasai Miles, filling out the rest. Indiana’s remaining portal haul, Josh Harris and Jason Drake, missed the entirety of the season due to injury.
That was a huge bet. Outside of Dorn, Miles and Sisley, there were and are no building blocks for future seasons. Only Dorn and Miles received extended minutes in Big Ten play. Indiana entered the 2025-26 season knowing full well it’d need another roster rebuild the next offseason. If Indiana was going to built a roster like that, with several short term additions, it became paramount that those players set a winning foundation. That’s generally what year one is for and what this roster seemed built to do, showcase DeVries’ style of basketball and how it can succeed. A winning season with an NCAA Tournament appearance would give the program some much needed momentum heading into the offseason.
That is not what happened.
Indiana took plenty of 3s alright, ranking 15th nationally in 3PA/FGA at 50.5%. Just a hair over half of the Hoosiers attempts from the field came from 3-point range and they converted on 34.7% of those attempts, good for 143rd nationally, above the average of 33.9%. That hot volume shooting led Indiana to three strong wins, beating Purdue and Wisconsin at home and UCLA on the road. The Hoosiers went 3-10 against KenPom’s top-30 teams, with the three wins being those mentioned previously.
The Hoosiers utterly collapsed down the stretch of the season, somehow looking like they had less chemistry in March than they did in November. They lost six of their final seven games at the worst possible time, with five of those losses coming by double digits. The lone single digit loss, Northwestern, later beat Indiana by double digits in the Big Ten Tournament. It’s hard to beat strong teams, yes, but Indiana had done it before and would’ve had to do so in the NCAA Tournament it’s almost certainly set to miss as a result of said collapse.
Long story short, the roster building approach did not work as it appeared intended to.
Now, instead of entering the offseason with momentum, Indiana finds itself in a similar position as it was last season with the addition of three incoming freshmen. Said freshmen appear to be longer-term building pieces rather than immediate impact players, which ended up being the case for Sisley this season. There’s tape to show portal prospects and clear roles carved out, but a lot of that tape is going to have an unfortunate score attached.
The question Indiana faces now is this: if we’ve already seen a pretty similar process, how are we to expect different results?
Join the conversation!
Sign up for a user account and get:
- Improved notifications system!
- Fewer ads
- Create community posts
- Comment on articles, community posts
- Rec comments, community posts
