If this is ‘goodbye’ for Trayce Jackson-Davis, he delivered what Indiana needed
PORTLAND, Ore.(WISH) — Indiana departed Portland for Bloomington on Friday, this time on a plane that fit, with mixed emotions following the blowout 82-53 loss to No. 5 Saint Mary’s on Thursday evening in the NCAA Tournament’s first round.
On Thursday night, following the second-most lopsided result of the day’s first round contests, Gaels Head Coach Randy Bennett said what everyone at the Moda Center was thinking: the Hoosiers didn’t have the energy to make this a real fight.
Thursday marked five games in eight days for Indiana, two more than it played over any eight days this season.
A two-point game with just over five minutes to play in the first half ballooned to multiple Saint Mary’s leads of 34 points during the second half.
Is Saint Mary’s the superior team? Yes. For many Hoosiers fans, that likely eases the pain of glancing at that final score one more time. Many instead opted to nod together at the fact this program took a step forward for the first time in five seasons.
Still, this was a brutal way to finish what was an electric seven days ahead of tip-off in Portland.
It was visible watching the team retreat off the floor and into the locker room Thursday night.
Teams that accomplish nothing have little reason to be upset, and the tears in the eyes of underclassmen Trey Galloway and Anthony Leal illustrate that these 17 Hoosiers players did get it done.
The ‘it’ this season, for Hoosier fans living in reality, was returning to the NCAA Tournament. Get there, and the season is a success. Fall short? A failure.
Trayce Jackson-Davis followed Coach Woodson into the locker room first following the loss in Portland, which was fitting, as the finality of March set in for the team who one week earlier needed multiple wins just to hear its name called on Selection Sunday.
The Hoosiers were amid their longest absence from NCAA Tournament action (2017-2021) since before Bob Knight left Army (1967-1971) to become the bench general in Bloomington.
A half-century later, Woodson needed his first team to conquer the pressure of March, or this offseason would cue up the chatter of an underwhelming return to Bloomington.
One week ago, that was the direction this story was heading.
And then, Jackson-Davis decided otherwise. He won’t go down as the star who moved Indiana back to national power. But, before that player arrives, Indiana needed someone to stand up and start fighting back. And Jackson-Davis did it.
The Trojan Horse
A product of Center Grove High School in south-suburban Indianapolis, Jackson-Davis’ decorated prep basketball career painted a bright picture for his collegiate career, but also drew some skeptics.
A McDonald’s All-American, the Indiana Gatorade Player of the Year, ranked nationally as a top-20 player by 247 Sports, and a key member of Team USA’s gold medal squad at the 2018 FIBA Americas Championships in Canada — his resume was loaded.
The quiet chatter in the stands between some at Trojans games: Was Jackson-Davis’ motor elite? Did he play with the ferocity required of a dominant post player in the Big Ten Conference? Is he big enough to play solely in the paint?
The questions, at the time, were fair. Center Grove was not a powerhouse steamrolling everyone in sight.
In 2019, then-Indiana Hoosiers head coach Archie Miller and his staff were eager to find out what kind of fire burned inside their coveted freshman power forward.
Miller didn’t have to wait long to find his answer.
Jackson-Davis finished his freshman season as one of only four first-year players in America to lead their team in scoring, rebounding, blocks, and free throw percentage. No freshman in program history hauled in more rebounds. Only one posted more blocks.
The typical tentative freshman tendencies were completely absent, as Jackson-Davis paraded to the free-throw line a whopping 168 times.
The Hoosiers beat Nebraska on a Wednesday evening during the opening night of the 2020 Big Ten Tournament in Indianapolis behind Jackson-Davis’ 12th double-double of the season. At that moment, the Hoosiers were positioned comfortably inside the NCAA Tournament’s field of 68 ahead of Selection Sunday.
During the game, the rest of the sports world centered on a story in Utah. Jazz Center Rudy Gobert became the first professional athlete in the United States to test positive for COVID-19, and the NBA immediately postponed games across the league.
That Indiana-Nebraska game went down as the final college basketball game to be completed before the COVID-19 shutdown across sports in the United States.
A New Voice
Despite being the only high-major player in the country to average 19 points and 9 rebounds per game, boos from Indiana fans reigned down on Jackson-Davis’ final seconds of his sophomore season.
The Hoosiers, who knew it was a make-or-break season for head coach Archie Miller, had just lost their opening game of the 2021 Big Ten Tournament in Indianapolis to Rutgers.
A sixth consecutive defeat to close their season ensured Indiana would watch the NCAA Tournament, which would be played solely in Indianapolis, from their couches in Bloomington.
The late collapse cemented Miller’s firing four days later.
Jackson-Davis had a decision to make, as NBA scouts continued to watch the tape turned in by the 6-foot-9-inch, 245-pound post force.
Meanwhile, two weeks following Miller’s dismissal, newly-anointed Indiana University director of athletics, Scott Dolson, needed an airplane.
Given the constraints of the pandemic, many of the coaching candidates Dolson interviewed were fine handling their vetting process over Zoom.
But not Mike Woodson. If you were serious about talking to the 63-year-old highly regarded NBA coach, that needed to happen face-to-face.
Dolson and his support staff met with Woodson, the former Hoosiers star scorer who spent the past four decades playing and coaching at the NBA level.
On March 29, 2021, Indiana brought Woodson home, returning him to the campus he left in 1980 as the Big Ten Player of the Year.
“This is a great day and a great fit for Indiana Basketball,” Dolson said. “Throughout this process, I was looking for someone I could partner with to return Indiana Basketball to a level of success that Hoosier fans have come to know and expect, and Mike is that person.”
The Indianapolis native completely changed the tone around the Hoosiers program, mixing teachings from his former Broad Ripple High School coach Bill Smith, a quarter-century of coaching knowledge from the NBA, and, most importantly in the eyes of Hoosiers fans, a direct connection back to Bob Knight.
“I said I wasn’t going to get sensitive, but boy, this is a great day for Mike Woodson and his family, and it’s a great day for the fans and Hoosier Nation,” Woodson said at his introductory press conference on March 29, 2021. “I’m going to bring all the old-timers back like the old days, and we going to bridge the gap between old and new. At the end of the day, it’s about two people or two things, and that’s the fans and our basketball program and our players. Our players will be first and foremost. I spoke to the guys last night, and I think they understand who Coach Woodson is early on because I’ve told them that this whole program is going to be about family.”
Before Woodson’s hire, Jackson-Davis was nearly “dead set” on hiring an agent and foregoing the remainder of his collegiate career for the NBA. At the time, essentially every contributing Hoosiers player alongside Jackson-Davis in 2021 was stationed in the transfer portal, eligible to play immediately at a new school.
A two-hour meeting with Woodson immediately wiped Jackson-Davis’ plan off the table.
He was coming back for a third season in Bloomington, and soon, the remainder of transfer-eligible Hoosiers, sans graduate shooting guard Al Durham and point guard Armaan Franklin, also decided to stay in cream and crimson.
“We talked about where he sees me in the offense, how he can help develop me into the player that I aspire to be, and also winning basketball games here,” Jackson-Davis said. “He told us when he came in that he doesn’t want to rebuild, he wants to win right away. He said I’m a big piece to that. After hearing that, after hearing an NBA coach tell you that, it just really was a simple decision to come back and play for him, honestly.”
Woodson shared his blueprint of developing Jackson-Davis’ perimeter shooting, playmaking with his off-hand, and above all leading Indiana back to where it belonged: The NCAA Tournament.
Eight Days in March
Despite starting Woodson’s first season 16-5 overall and 7-4 in Big Ten play, the Hoosiers arrived in Indianapolis for the 2022 Big Ten Tournament in ‘must-win’ mode yet again.
A 2-7 finish to the regular season left Indiana on the outside of the projected 68-team NCAA Tournament field, matched up against a Michigan team riding a nine-game win streak in the heated series.
Everything Jackson-Davis envisioned during that initial meeting with Woodson was in jeopardy with just over 13 minutes left in the game and trailing by 17 points to the Wolverines.
And then it happened.
Sparked by Jackson-Davis’ (24 points) second-half dominance over Wolverines’ star Hunter Dickinson in the post, the Hoosiers pulled off the second-largest comeback in Big Ten Tournament history and moved squarely back onto the NCAA Tournament bubble.
The next day, top-seed Illinois never found its outside shooting and a second-consecutive stellar offensive effort from Jackson-Davis (21 points) spurred an upset win over the Illini.
For Hoosier fans, this was the most enjoyable stretch of March basketball in six years. Indiana was officially heading back to the NCAA Tournament for the first time since 2016.
“There’s been a lot of talk, especially the last two years, of me not showing up at the end of the season, so I’m trying to change that narrative,” Jackson-Davis said following Indiana’s win over Illinois. “I think that team is, honestly, the team that got me in the slump that I’ve been in the last month. And, when we played them on February 5, it took a lot of my confidence away. So, Illinois was a bully today, and I think we took care of that problem. I’m just going to keep playing the way that I am and then we’ll go from there.”
Again, instead of wilting, Indiana punched back.
On Saturday, in the Big Ten Tournament Semifinals, a last-second banked-in three-pointer from Iowa’s Jordan Bohannon negated a chance for the Hoosiers to meet arch-rival Purdue in the Big Ten Tournament Championship Game for the first time. Jackson-Davis (31 points) put in arguably the best game of his season and solidified one of the best individual Big Ten Tournament runs in recent memory.
A bus ride back to campus set the stage for Selection Sunday and yet another twist for the program.
Not only was Indiana placed in one of the ‘First Four’ play-in games in Dayton against fellow No. 12 seed Wyoming, a win meant traveling to Portland for the Round of 64.
A poor shooting game from both sides gave way to the best player on the floor in Dayton. Jackson-Davis (29 points) ensured Indiana’s March wasn’t done yet.
You know what happened next. The NCAA-provided plane was way too small, the Hoosiers were late to Portland, and less than 36-hours later, No. 5 seed Saint Mary’s erased any question regarding who the best team was moving forward in March.
Following the loss, Jackson-Davis didn’t put a timetable on the decision he now faces for a second time.
The development of a jump shot is still Jackson-Davis’ top priority, but his stock in the eyes of NBA executives certainly jumped over the past eight days.
Ahead of the loss in Portland, Jackson-Davis averaged over 26 points per game and shot better than 65% from the field in four consecutive, pressure-packed games against four NCAA Tournament teams with top-level big men: Michigan, Illinois, Iowa, Wyoming.
“Just being with my guys and backs against the wall, going into the Big Ten tournament, seeing the Hoosier hysteria around the state, it was a blessing to be a part of it,” Jackson-Davis said following Indiana’s loss to Saint Mary’s. “Just seeing the guys rally when adversity struck and being able to compete and clawing our way back in and making the Big Dance. I know it’s not how we wanted to go out, but it’s an honor and blessing to be here. I’m proud of my guys for always fighting, and that’s probably my favorite part.”
If this is how Trayce Jackson-Davis departs Bloomington, he goes out a fighter. There is no disputing that.