If there’s one thing that has clearly broken Indiana’s 2023-24 season, it’s faulty roster construction.
For whatever reason, Mike Woodson and his staff failed to land big-time guard talent in the transfer portal last spring, and that mishap, along with the injuries suffered by Xavier Johnson, haunted them throughout throughout the year on both sides of the field.
It seems clear that lessons have been learned.
The Hoosiers wasted no time, even skipping the NIT, to jump into the transfer portal with both feet.
With significant financial tailwinds in the name, image and likeness era, Indiana attacked the offseason with vigor and has produced impressive results thus far.
How impressive is that?
Until Saturday, Indiana was No. 1 in the 2024 transfer portal according to 247Sports after landing Kanaan Carlyle (Stanford), Oumar Ballo (Arizona) and Myles Rice (Washington State). You had no idea the impact the Big Ten’s poaching of four Pac-12 teams — leading to its demise — would have, did you?
According to data from Bart Torvik, Indiana’s current list of 10 scholars produces an expected overall grade that would rank in the top 15 based on the final 2024 rankings.
Carlyle and Rice give Indiana a pair of dynamic guards. Rice was first team All-Pac-12 as a freshman. Carlyle had three games of 22 points or more against major opponents, again, as a freshman. You could argue that Indiana hasn’t had a single guard at his level on the roster since Yogi Ferrell, with the exception of Jalen Hood-Schifino. And now they have two.
It’s interesting to compare Carlyle and Rice’s freshman seasons to North Carolina’s RJ Davis and Caleb Love in 2020-21. No one is arguing that Carlyle and Rice will have the careers of Davis and Love, but it’s not unreasonable to argue that IU’s two new guards were better than Davis and Love as freshmen.
There are concerns about Carlyle and Rice’s three-point shooting ability, but consider this.
Davis shot 32% from three as a freshman for UNC, while Love shot 26%. Those conversion rates are almost exactly the same as Carlyle and Rice’s as freshmen, respectively. Davis and Love both improved to 36 percent as sophomores — nothing crazy — and that improvement was good enough to lead UNC to the national title game. It’s no exaggeration to say that if Carlyle and Rice both shoot around 36% from three as sophomores, Indiana will be a major problem for opponents. And from a directional standpoint, this kind of shooting improvement doesn’t seem unreasonable.
CBS Sports’ Jon Rothstein said Saturday that “Indiana is a consensus Top 25 team entering 2024-25” after the addition of Carlyle. But will IU have enough talent to make a Final Four like North Carolina in 2022? After all, Woodson has repeatedly said his goal is to win championships, and fans share those aspirations.
As impressive as things have gone so far for Woodson and his team, when it comes to filling out the roster, what we’ve seen so far has been sort of the “easy” part. And the Hoosiers still appear to be a step or two away from truly filling out the roster and putting themselves in the conversation for one of the best teams next season.
No, there’s nothing really easy about recruiting talent like Carlyle, Ballo and Rice. But the fact is that all three could commit to IU with some degree of comfort, as they will play a major role next season.
Those three, along with returnees Trey Galloway, Malik Reneau and Mackenzie Mgbako, along with freshman Bryson Tucker, project to take the lion’s share of minutes as things stand.
Virtually everyone in the transfer portal wants playing time. They may have other reasons to make a decision, but they all want to see meaningful action. And it’s not easy for IU to promise that with a straight face right now, a fact that undoubtedly played a role in their portal recruiting Connor Hickman, Ryan Conwell and quite possibly Connor Essegian.
What did these three have in common? They are very good shooters. And Indiana will undoubtedly continue to look for proven shooters to play roles on the wing and in the frontcourt to round out the roster.
Players like Evansville’s Ben Humrichous, Grace College’s Elijah Malone and Florida Gulf Coast’s Zach Anderson have all drawn interest from IU, and there are plenty of others just off the public radar who could step in and really catapult this list to an elite level.
Woodson and his team have come this far, so there’s no reason to doubt them now.
But it won’t be easy.
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