IU will travel to Hawaii for three games in as many days Nov. 23-25 in one of the top early season college basketball tournaments.
Kansas, which won its 11th consecutive Big 12 regular season title last season, is poised to be a preseason top-10 team and headlines the eight-team field in Maui. Chaminade, St. John’s, UCLA, UNLV, Vanderbilt and Wake Forest round out of the list competitors hailing from the top conferences in college basketball.
IU will play Wake Forest, followed by St. John’s or Vanderbilt, and then conclude with a matchup against one of the four teams on the opposite side of the bracket.
It will be IU Coach Tom Crean’s third trip to the Maui Invitational after making consecutive appearances in 2007 and 2008 in his final year at Marquette and his first season at IU.
“It’s an incredible tournament and an unreal honor for us as a team and a staff — and certainly a University and a fan base — to be a part of it,” Crean said Tuesday afternoon on a teleconference for the coaches competing in this year’s tournament.
“It was like we were going to the Final Four,” Crean said. “That’s how exciting that win was for us. So we’ve seen it on both accounts.”
In his third trip to the tournament, he’ll arguably have one of the best teams of his career. The Hoosiers return seven of their top eight scorers and rebounders from last season, plus they add four newcomers to their frontcourt.
Thomas Bryant, a 6-foot-10 freshman power forward, is the biggest name among the newcomers, and Crean said Bryant will be able to help IU on both ends of the floor.
“You’ve got to have rim protection, so right away he brings that,” Crean said. “He moves his feet pretty well ... But he’s really going to affect us offensively too.”
For Bryant and his fellow first-year players — freshmen Juwan Morgan, O.G. Anunoby and Harrison Niego, a walk-on, as well as graduate transfer Max Bielfeldt — the Maui Invitational will be their first road trip with IU.
“Judging on their summer, all four of those guys are going to be impact factors on our team if we’re going to have as good a team as we can have,” Crean said of the group, minus Niego, “because we truly want to get ourselves to a point where we’re two-deep at everything that we do on the court.”
Crean said opponents treat IU like a “destination game,” given the Hoosiers’ history.
The target on IU’s back will only grow larger once top-25 polls are released and a low double-digit number is placed in front of the team’s name.
But its coach wants the team to be the hunter, not the hunted, in Maui.
“We’ve got to have a mindset that we’re always going to be hunting,” Crean said. “I think when you’ve got a chance to play three games in three days like this with the completion level that it is, it just force feeds that right into you.”
