IU's busy offseason just the start: 'We had to go out and build our team back.'

BLOOMINGTON – Mike Woodson turned up to IU basketball team media day Wednesday in a bullish mood.

He talked about feeling good after knee-replacement surgery earlier in the offseason. He reiterated his aims of Big Ten and national championships with his alma mater. He minced no words about wanting to “sit at the table with all the top players in recruiting.”

“Along with my staff, I hobbled around this summer,” Woodson said, playfully referring to that surgery, “and we were able to build our basketball team back.”

The bones of it, certainly, to forgive one more anatomical reference. But Woodson knows his work is only just beginning. Indiana will need all his refreshed energy, as in his third season he attempts to build back — his words — a program for the first time in five seasons not able to count on Trayce Jackson-Davis to solve its problems.

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There will almost certainly be growing pains. There will be unforeseen challenges, and perhaps some difficult nights in an unforgiving conference. But at the end of it, there may also be a team built much more in Woodson’s vision than any he’s had in Bloomington before.

That makes the season to come Woodson’s most fascinating yet.

“There’s a lot of work that's still left on the table,” Woodson said, “that we've got to get these guys to understand who we are and what we're about and how we want to play on both ends of the floor.

“Only time will tell.”

Few teams improve, or even hold serve, in Indiana’s position.

Four starters are gone. Two are in the NBA. The Hoosiers’ two highest-usage players by some distance last season, Jackson-Davis and Jalen Hood-Schifino, now draw paychecks in San Francisco and Los Angeles, respectively, and a clutch of key veterans exhausted their eligibility.

Couple that to a bench thinned by transfer departures, and Woodson’s team is not so much restocked as remade.

Yet Indiana’s coach seems far from discouraged.

“Basically, we lost 10 guys last year, with the two walk-ons as well,” Woodson said. “We had to go out and build our team back. I'm pleased with the players that we've brought in, knowing that when you add a lot of pieces to your team, there's a lot of work that comes with that.”

Some of that is the natural passion of a coach valuing the process as much as the result. But some is, by Woodson’s own admission, an opportunity to pivot to a different way of playing, one more familiar to his decades coaching in the NBA than the way the Hoosiers structured themselves across the past two seasons.

Opportunity might not be quite the right word there. Woodson was happy, and should have been, to have Jackson-Davis in his corner and his lineup from day one on the job.

It’s only Jackson-Davis was unlike very nearly any other featured player Woodson ever coached. Not until his first season in charge at IU did Woodson, according to his own telling, build an offense so driven by post-ups. Only last season, when Woodson estimated his team tilted slightly more toward pick-and-roll offense than post-up driven offense, did that even manage to balance out.

“Fifty-three percent of our play last year was pick-and-roll basketball,” Woodson said. “Forty-seven percent was posting the basketball. Where the first year we dominated the post with Trayce.

“I would have been foolish not to utilize him. But we expanded him out on the floor a little bit last year, and he was able to do some things in that area.”

In place of Jackson-Davis and all his departed teammates, Woodson’s added length, reach, athleticism and lineup versatility.

Kel’el Ware is what Mackenzie Mgbako called “a footer” Wednesday — he stretches to 7-2. Mgbako himself drew praise for his versatility and scoring punch from teammates. Payton Sparks and Anthony Walker solidify a post rotation depleted by attrition. Freshmen fill depth roles. Sophomores step forward. Team captains Xavier Johnson and Trey Galloway manage the locker room.

All of which begs the question: What now?

“I don't know,” Woodson said. “I'm still looking at our style of play. I think you still have to mix it up. You've got to have post play, and everybody is playing pick-and-roll, which I was accustomed to doing in the pros. It's nothing new to me.”

“But,” Woodson said for the second time, “only time will tell.”

Indiana’s coach will be honest about that. His team is a work in progress, and for awhile it’s going to be more work than progress.

None of this is new to Woodson, though. He built a team up virtually from the foundation in Atlanta, making it a regular playoff contender. He overhauled New York’s roster in one offseason to construct a winner around Carmelo Anthony, with whom Woodson still maintains a close relationship.

Both those franchises reached the playoffs in Woodson’s tenure. It’s possible this new-look Indiana will end its journey in the NCAA tournament, though even Woodson will tell you that’s far from assured. There are myriad questions to answer, and problems to solve.

After anchoring his first two seasons around the assured steadiness Jackson-Davis provided him — augmented by Woodson’s development of Jackson-Davis, Hood-Schifino and others — IU’s coach ventures into the relative unknown in year three.

He has done this sort of thing before, but never at the college level and never via college methods of roster building. He’s also not yet had this chance at Indiana, to build a roster according to his own vision, outfitted with the skills and attributes he values most.

It might work. Might not. But it should be fascinating.

Follow IndyStar IU Insider Zach Osterman on X: @ZachOsterman.

This article originally appeared on Indianapolis Star: Indiana basketball: Revamped roster makes Hoosiers a bit of a mystery