Indiana men's basketball kicks of the 2026-27 season, the second under Darian DeVries, Monday night against Eastern Illinois on Big Ten Plus. This is the kind of game made for Big Ten Plus, as Eastern Illinois starts the year 360th out of 365 teams ranked nationally by KenPom.
You'd have to go back to the first year of the Archie Miller era to find a year when Indiana lost to a team worse than 120th in KenPom, let alone a team a full 240 spots lower, so this isn't going to be one to watch for the end result. Instead, it's about seeing what Indiana's got, who plays well with who, and what spots guys are put in.
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For the third year in a row, Indiana has almost an entirely new roster, so there should be plenty of kinks to work out in games like this and the Thursday matchup with Bellarmine before taking on Syracuse next week.
Here's what to watch for:
Interior play
In year one in the Big Ten, DeVries' group struggled with just about everything you can do inside. Rebounding was rough on both ends, the offense got a lot of shots blocked, and the defense didn't block a lot of shots.
All of that should change this year with the additions of Aiden Sherrell
and Samet Ygitoglu
. The two big men transferred in from Alabama and SMU, respectively, and should both be a big part of what Indiana wants to do this year.
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Against a team like Eastern Illinois, the pair should look even more dominant. We won't see too much of the playbook, I'd think, but it'll be interesting to see how many plays end with inside shots versus the 3-pointers Indiana relied on last year.
Darren Harris
Darren Harris is one of the most intriguing players on this team, in part of how little we know about him. He's never averaged ten minutes per game on a season, but mostly because of the NBA players ahead of him in the lineup at Duke.
When he did get extended run a few times last year, Harris was able to show why he was a high four-star recruit. Against Notre Dame, for example, he had 16 points on 2-5 shooting from 3-point range. He had another strong shooting performance against Army, going 5-7 from deep for 15 points.
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One game against Eastern Illinois won't prove anything one way or the other, but the role he plays, the guys he's on the floor with, and the minutes he sees could be a good indication of what DeVries and company have seen from him in practice this summer and fall.
Chemistry
As opposed to last year's team, which featured a lot of guys new to high major basketball, eager to prove they belonged, this year's group is mostly high major prospects. Some of them were the best players on their team, and most of them were high usage.
This could make it trickier for things to come together on the court. To take just one example, Jaeden Mustaf and Markus Burton are both used to their teams offenses running through them to a degree, and neither are necessarily used to having talent around them they can pass to for reliable assists.
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For those reasons, I would imagine this team takes a little more time to adjust than past Indiana teams. We've seen teams full of transfers in the last few years, but this class seems to involve more guys learning new roles.
There's definitely more talent in the room than the Hoosiers have had in recent memory, so things should really take off once the pieces start coming together. Monday's game will be our first chance to see how much work there is to be done on that front.
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