Tayton Conerway started the first 19 games of Indiana’s 2025-26 season.
But after suffering an ankle injury during IU’s Jan. 17 game against Iowa, and then an illness last Saturday ahead of the Wisconsin game, the Indiana guard, who is now healthy, will come off the bench.
It isn’t typical for a starter to lose his role when dealing with relatively minor setbacks like what Conerway has had to contend with over the last month.
But his replacement in the starting five has had an atypical run of success that really left IU coach Darian DeVries with no choice.
Junior wing Nick Dorn made 20 of 43 (46.5%) three-point attempts in the four games that followed Iowa. The emergence of Dorn as a third dangerous threat from beyond the arc has helped unlock a new level to the IU offense. Opposing defenses have struggled to stay connected to all three of Dorn, Lamar Wilkerson and Tucker DeVries, and the space those three create has led to Sam Alexis and Reed Bailey having some highly productive games inside the arc as well.
“We’ll just take it a game at a time and see what those rotations look like,” Darian DeVries said Friday ahead of Indiana’s trip to No. 8 Illinois. “But as we head into it (the Illinois trip) we’ll stick with what what we’ve been going with here recently and try to get him (Conerway) back involved. Then those minutes will be distributed based on how we’re playing, how he’s playing and and we’ll just take it from there.”
Another complicating factor as relates to plugging Conerway back in is the play of late by senior guard Conor Enright. He has been masterful at facilitating the offense, averaging 7.4 assists against just 1.4 turnovers per game over Indiana’s last five outings. And he’s also made 6 of 13 from three over that same stretch.
Enright has averaged 37.6 minutes per game over those last five contests, so there’s certainly an opportunity to scale that back some.
Conerway will likely fill in for multiple players in the weeks to come as DeVries tries to find the right balance ahead of the postseason. That includes Dorn, who has made just 4 of 22 threes (18.2%) over his last three games. DeVries says Dorn was one of multiple IU players dealing with the flu around the time the team returned from their two-game trip to California. So that could explain at least in part his sudden reversal of fortunes shooting the ball.
And there will be games when Conerway is exactly what the Hoosiers need, perhaps because Enright is in foul trouble, IU needs better perimeter defense, or teams are daring the Hoosiers to beat them off the bounce — something that is a strength of Conerway’s game.
But at least on Sunday in Champaign (1 p.m. ET, CBS), Conerway will come off the bench.
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