Darian DeVries Won’t Be Rushed In Fitting Roster Together Right For Indiana

The churn of the transfer portal and the commitment of players to other programs can create an urgency from fans. Indiana basketball coach Darian DeVries blocks that out and is committed to building a roster that fits together and wins together.

Darian DeVries poses in the Indiana locker room in a promotional shot. / Indiana athletics

BLOOMINGTON, Ind. – It’s Saturday. The transfer portal has been officially open for almost two weeks, and Indiana coach Darian DeVries has been on the job since the week the portal opened.

Indiana has signed two players out of the portal in an offseason where the 2025-26 roster was going to be built from that outside source. Some players who have visited Indiana did not or have not yet committed.

That dynamic is making some Indiana fans – particularly those who determine portal success on the ability to amass players – a little bit nervous. Even though the portal remains open for another three weeks with the ability to sign players at any moment.

Regardless of the time frame, DeVries is not going to rush into grabbing bodies just because Indiana can afford them or whether it fits an artificial time frame in someone’s mind.

As he said during his introductory press conference, DeVries is all about making sure the pieces on his roster fit together. That is still his priority no matter how hot or cold the transfer portal seems in a particular moment.

“I think the biggest thing is just make sure we stay consistent with what we want from a staff standpoint and from a player standpoint,” DeVries said during an interview with Hoosiers On SI on Friday.

“As we're building that roster, you want to get it right more so than you want to be in a hurry to do things. For us, we have a staff to put together, a roster to put together that we feel like is going to set us up for success for the long term.”

Short-term realities have to be blended with long-term stability. That’s what DeVries believes.

“(Recruited players) are not going to have all of (the traits), but you want to have a good majority of those type of things that as you're assembling that roster and putting it together, that they all can complement each other, play off one another, and ultimately win together,” DeVries said.

The portal has had a transformative effect on the way the offseason works – and that goes double for teams that make a coaching change. It used to be that schools would take their time on a coaching search, which meant taking more time to put together a staff. Rosters stayed mostly static. No more than a few players, at most, usually left a roster.

Now coaching hires are accelerated so they’re in place to contend with the portal. Assistant coaches are hired quickly, and all of the above are thrust into the portal in short order, trying to sell their vision to kids who now have name, image and likeness in which to barter their services.

DeVries hasn’t even completed his staff yet, and he recognizes the time constraints that would make it easy to compromise roster-building principles. It takes discipline to stay on-task and make sure the puzzle pieces fit. DeVries intends to maintain that discipline, regardless of the pressures that the portal creates. Indiana will not overreact to any single player that commits elsewhere.

That remains true even though the wrinkle in this particular portal cycle is the impending House settlement. Rules might change mid-stream in terms of how NIL compensation will work for players if the House settlement is approved by U.S. District Court Judge Claudia Wilken. The final approval hearing is scheduled for Monday.

Many schools want to get players in the fold before their NIL could be compromised by a clearinghouse that will determine if NIL deals are “fair market value.”

“We've certainly been aggressive, understanding some of what could potentially be that judgment and ruling,” DeVries said.

But even that wrinkle isn’t going to make DeVries deviate from the right roster fit.

“It's still about making sure, as we're being aggressive, it's being aggressive with the guys that we feel would be a great fit and help us kind of create that culture that we want to establish in our first year,” DeVries noted.

“At the end we'll end up with a locker room that's going to be able to compete and wants to compete. At the same time, that element right now is there's just a lot of variables out there right now that you're navigating through,” DeVries added.

One thing that DeVries has always held dear is the point guard position. All of his teams have had strong point guards. Javon Small was a standout at West Virginia in DeVries’ lone season in Morgantown.

Nick Norton, now on DeVries’ Indiana staff, was producing at a prodigious clip at Drake until a knee injury ended his 2019 season. Roman Penn was one of the best players in the Missouri Valley Conference at Drake from 2020-23.

He was replaced by Conor Enright – one of the two players, along with Tucker DeVries, that Indiana has secured commitments from. It’s no accident that DeVries wanted a point guard he can trust running the floor for the Hoosiers. Enright played at Drake in the 2024 season. He played at DePaul in 2025.

“We've had different styles of point guards, from shooting point guards and scoring point guards to facilitating point guards. So I think it's more about just their ability to kind of lead a team offensively and defensively. That’s a huge priority just to make sure that we find that guy that we feel really good about leading both ends of the floor,” DeVries said.

Whether it’s a point guard or any other position on the floor, DeVries is committed to creating a roster where cohesiveness creates competitiveness. In a portal period where stats for prospective players are a shiny toy for fans to fixate on, there are still characteristics stats can’t measure that DeVries uses to foster winning.

“It still comes down to making sure that we have guys that are about winning and wanting to get better. Self-motivated, competitive. There's just a lot of characteristics that go into what you want out of every individual kid,” DeVries said.

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