Here's the result:
BLOOMINGTON – The problem with IU basketball freshman Trayce Jackson-Davis is that he’s almost always good, and he almost never disappears. Maybe if he was a little less consistent — less dependable, more of a mystery — he’d get more attention. Maybe if he was more like, say, Devonte Green.
Don’t look at me that way. Am I being mean to Devonte Green? Nah. Fair isn’t mean. Honest isn’t mean. And anyway, today is no time to be mean to IU basketball. The Hoosiers beat No. 17 Iowa, and even if the Hawkeyes came into the game with seven available scholarship players and left it with six, a win is a win is a win, especially for an IU team that had lost its past four games to fall uncomfortably close to the bursting side of the NCAA tournament bubble.
Today is a day to celebrate the Hoosiers after an 89-77 win. So I’m going to celebrate the one Hoosier who always brings it, the one Hoosier — the only Hoosier — IU coach Archie Miller can be reasonably sure will play well every single time. His name is Trayce Jackson-Davis, the 6-9 freshman power forward from Center Grove. You’re aware of this, right?
And you’re aware that TJD is being taken for granted this year, right?
Let me show you. Let me prove it.
Well, no. First, let’s talk about Devonte Green. Everyone else is. But nobody’s going to do it like this.
So good, so bad, so Devonte
Green went off in the first half. He was sensational. He came into the game with the Hoosiers trailing 9-6, and in 2½ minutes he scored 12 points and had two assists and a steal. Just like that, IU leads 31-16 and this game is over. The Hawkeyes never get within single digits again.
On Twitter, everyone was loving them some Devonte Green. His brother was here, Danny Green of the Los Angeles Lakers, and that was cool. Also cool, I guess, is the mercurial manner in which Green plays. And by that I mean: He can be great, or he can stink. In one four-game stretch earlier this season, Green scored 18 points against Maryland, one against Rutgers, 19 against Ohio State and zero against Nebraska.
In the past five games: He had 16 in the second game against Maryland, then four against Penn State. He had 13 against Ohio State and then three against Purdue.
And then 27 on Thursday night against Iowa.
The first question of the postgame news conference was for Green. And the second. The third question was for Trayce-Jackson Davis … about Devonte Green. The fourth question was for Green. That’s how it went, with people wanting to know about playing in front of his brother, about getting into the zone, about hunting his shots.
I asked him a different question, and even told-slash-warned him: Devonte, I’m going the other way. Where do you go, I was asking him, when you
don’t have a game like this? The Purdue game is an example, I’m telling him.
Green didn’t understand the question.
He said: “Can you elaborate?”
Sure. I mentioned his feast-or-famine tendencies, told him he has NBA offensive talent, said he was too good to have games with three points, two, one, zero …
Now he understands.
“Inconsistency,” he said. “Inconsistency. I just …”
Green pauses. I don’t think he understands why he’s being asked this question after he has scored 27 points. He’s not making the connection, and I get this, that he’s never brought into the interview room when he goes scoreless. He comes in here only when he goes bonkers. So this is my time, my only time, to ask the question that has come to define the IU season: Where does Green go when he’s not great, dragging the Hoosiers down with him?
Anyway, he’s ready to finish his answer.
“I don’t really know how to answer that,” he said. “I get inconsistent if things are inconsistent.”
Miller was more illuminating about Green’s inconsistency, saying Green can get “lethargic and down on himself,” and noting that “he doesn’t have that fire where he comes out (determined to improve) the next day. I wish he had that.”
“We don’t have time for that,” Miller was saying about Green’s occasional disappearances. “(He can be) one of the best players in the country. (But) you look back on some games and you say: Where was he?”
Anyway, enough about that. Devonte Green was great, and everyone saw it. He wasn’t lethargic, wasn’t down on himself. For spurts of this game, he was one of the best players in the country.
But Trayce Jackson-Davis was great, too. Nobody seemed to notice.
And that ticks me off, to be honest with you.
TJD is great, and you're missing it
In the best basketball conference in the country — and the Big Ten is the best, by a large margin — Trayce Jackson-Davis is the league’s best freshman. And that, too, is not close. He came into the game leading Big Ten freshmen in scoring (13.8 ppg), field-goal shooting (59.6%) blocked shots (1.9), and free throws made (94) and attempted (132). He was second in rebounding (7.9).
Jackson-Davis will be the league’s Freshman of the Year — he has earned the Big Ten Freshman of the Week four times this season — but the story here isn’t a lifetime achievement award. The story here is that he was similarly good (if not better) on Thursday night, too: 17 points, 10 rebounds, two blocks, two assists and a steal.
And nobody noticed. Nobody in the postgame news conference, with almost every question about Devonte Green, and nobody on Twitter, either. Is Twitter the perfect analysis of what a fan base or a city is thinking? Of course not. But in real time, it’s as good as we’ve got. And this is what we got on Thursday night: Six of the top 10 trending topics in Indianapolis were about the game, and not one was about Trayce Jackson-Davis.
Devonte Green was the No. 1 topic. Iowa’s Luka Garza (who was sensational: 38 points, eight rebounds, four blocks) was No. 4. Also in the top 10 were Race Thompson (who scored 10 points) and Jerome Hunter (who had a technical) and Assembly Hall (which had thousands of empty seats).
People talk about what they talk about, and nobody’s talking about Jackson-Davis, the freshman from Center Grove who was dunking and smearing Iowa shots like bugs against the glass. He was stealing the ball late with Iowa trying to rally, and — wait a minute. There’s a big man locally trending on Twitter in the final moments of the game, and it’s …
Oh. It’s Steven Adams of the Oklahoma City Thunder. Apparently he threw in a shot from midcourt and then did a sad little attempt at a shimmy. People thought it was cute, I guess.
Trayce Jackson-Davis gets double-doubles — this was his sixth of the season — and shoots nearly 60% and blocks shots and rebounds and brings it, really
brings it, every game.
His consistency isn’t cute, I guess.
Even if it is the best thing about the 2019-20 IU basketball team.
Find IndyStar columnist Gregg Doyel on Twitter at @GreggDoyelStar or at www.facebook.com/gregg.doyel.
