If Darian DeVries goes on to turn around the Indiana basketball program and get the Hoosiers back to the top of the Big Ten, circle mid-April as when it all changed.
The Hoosiers’ roster isn’t complete yet, but five transfer portal commitments over the span of three days have injected life into the DeVries tenure, providing a jolt of talent and optimism that was sorely needed after an underwhelming 18–14 first season. All five commits come from the high-major level and four averaged in double figures scoring. They address the two biggest pain points from last season’s roster at point guard and center.
The five commits:
Markus Burton is a Mishawaka kid who has scored a ton of points in three seasons at Notre Dame, including leading the ACC in scoring as a sophomore in 2024–25. He’s not without warts, dealing with injuries in back-to-back seasons and struggling at times with turnovers. But Indiana needed a premier portal point guard, and Burton certainly qualifies.
Jaeden Mustaf was a top-60 recruit out of high school who has toiled in relative anonymity at Georgia Tech the last two seasons in spite of averaging north of 10 points per game for the Yellow Jackets. Consider this something of a buy low on an athletic guard with positional size.
Darren Harris is another former big-time recruit, once the No. 35 player in his class before two seasons in a bench role at Duke. He entered college billed as a potentially elite shooter, but shot just 31% across two seasons and didn’t do enough outside of shooting the ball to earn more consistent playing time.
Samet Yiğitoğlu is a mass of humanity at 7' 2" and a two-way force around the rim. He was the No. 1 offensive rebounder in the ACC this past season and among the most coveted centers available. SMU was more than 10 points per 100 possessions better defensively when Yiğitoğlu was on the floor this season, his length around the basket a major deterrent for opposing drivers. Yiğitoğlu is the exact type of five-man Indiana lacked this season, a big reason it collapsed so spectacularly down the stretch.
Aiden Sherrell made it a perfect five for five for Indiana’s early wave of visitors, another elite portal big man picking the Hoosiers after a strong season at Alabama. With the Crimson Tide, he was a full-time center; at Indiana, he’ll likely split time between the four and the five in bigger lineups next to Yiğitoğlu. Offensively, that pairing could be dynamic given Sherrell’s ability to stretch the floor. Defensively, Sherrell will be tested from a mobility standpoint guarding smaller players, but college basketball as a whole is slanting toward playing bigger. Adding two top-tier centers from the portal gives Indiana a chance to do just that.
Conservatively, Burton, Yiğitoğlu and Sherrell are three of the top 50 players who’ll change teams this offseason. The roster isn’t complete (in part due to the Hoosiers having just one total returner from last season’s roster), but that trio in particular gives Indiana real building blocks and reasons for significant optimism heading into DeVries’s second season on the job.
It’s encouraging that DeVries (guided by new executive director of basketball Ryan Carr, formerly of the Indiana Pacers’ front office) has made the necessary adjustments in roster-building after a fairly disastrous first go-round in the portal last spring. Indiana was heavily undersized, with just two contributors over 6' 8" in senior transfers Reed Bailey and Sam Alexis. The narrative early was that Indiana could overcome that lack of size with skill and shooting, and few teams in college basketball fired up triples at as high a rate as Indiana did. That thinking proved fatally flawed and made beefing up the frontcourt priority No. 1 in the portal. The Yiğitoğlu/Sherrell double won’t be cheap, but on paper it’s a worthy investment for two can’t-miss bigs to stabilize things at the rim.
Big fish in tow, now it’s on DeVries and the Indiana staff to build quality depth. This was another of Indiana’s major failings in Year 1. By late in the season, DeVries had little faith in anyone outside his top six or seven key pieces, failing to hit on some of the lower-budget portal and international additions that filled out his first roster. A full high school class with three top-80 recruits should help there and hopefully be future building blocks, but more pieces DeVries can trust to put in games late is a must.
The remaining big hole, if there is one, is one more dynamic scorer in the backcourt, assuming that Mustaf and Harris are more useful plug-and-play pieces than stars. Pair Burton with another quality bucket-getter, and the Indiana offense suddenly looks that much more dangerous.
Indiana fans have proclaimed themselves offseason champions in the past (most recently with the Oumar Ballo–led class that ultimately precipitated Mike Woodson’s demise as head coach in Bloomington), so it’s easy to question whether these will be the same ol’ Hoosiers.
But all told, this five-man flurry was exactly what the doctor ordered for an Indiana program in desperate need of a big spring. Because of the lack of any meaningful holdovers (minus local product Trent Sisley, a Woodson signee who earned some rotation minutes as a freshman) from last year’s on-the-fly roster flip, Indiana was staring down as important an offseason as any major program in terms of landing impactful pieces both for now and the future. Landing this talented quintet should give DeVries a fighting chance to get the Hoosiers program rolling again, and could be an early moment that changed the tenor in Bloomington after a bumpy first season.
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This article was originally published on www.si.com as A Critical April Stretch Could Reframe Indiana’s Trajectory Under Darian DeVries.
