Trayce Jackson-Davis has no shortage of reasons to look back on his Indiana career with pride, but there is one thing he says he would change: the way he handled his outside shot.
Jackson-Davis, now with the Toronto Raptors and heading into his fourth NBA season in 2026-27, said he wishes he had taken his three-point development more seriously while at Indiana. Across 126 games with the Hoosiers, he attempted just three 3-pointers.
“I wish that I would have taken it more seriously,” Jackson-Davis told JMV. “Going all the way back to my freshman year, I was a four and Joey Brunk was the five.
I felt like I was more of a slasher and a cutter, but I wasn’t really a post-up player. That development didn’t really happen until my second year, my sophomore year, when Joey got hurt.
“If I had stayed in that four role and started drifting towards the corner, it would have been good for my growth. But Joey got hurt, and then all of a sudden I was averaging 20 points my sophomore year. I thought, ‘Okay, well, it’s pretty easy to score inside.’
“Then my junior year came and Woody (IU coach Mike Woodson) was kind of iffy (on shooting threes). He didn’t really say not to shoot, but he didn’t really force me to either, so I kind of didn’t.”
That part of his game never really took off in Bloomington, but Jackson-Davis did make other changes with the NBA in mind. By his senior year, his assist numbers had doubled, a sign of how much more he was operating as a playmaker against all the extra attention he drew.
He also started handling the ball more and bringing it up the floor himself, something that wasn’t part of his earlier game. That idea didn’t exactly get a warm welcome from Woodson at first.
“I remember during the first or second practice, I was taking the ball up the floor and Woody told me, ‘Pass it to a guard.’ Then, during the next practice I said no and I just kept doing it.
“Eventually he just said all right, screw it. I feel like if I would have started shooting threes, he would have been the same way.
I don’t think he would have told me not to shoot it. Maybe he would have preferred me to go dunk it if I was that open, but I feel like if I would have shot those shots, he wouldn’t have cared.”
Jackson-Davis said that was part of his mindset in college: if he wasn’t going to expand as a shooter, he needed to add something else. So he leaned into being a different kind of big man, one willing to rebound and push the ball himself rather than just hand it off and run the floor.
Looking back, he also explained why he left Indiana when he did. He said the extra COVID year never felt right to him, even though he could have returned to the program and kept building on a career that already had him as Indiana’s all-time leader in rebounds and blocks.
“It was fake almost. If I would have beat the scoring record and pushed out records, that extra year, it didn’t feel real,” Jackson-Davis said on the Ride with JMV last week.
“And that’s just the competition I have within myself. That’s one of the main reasons why I left.
I had a phenomenal senior year, I don’t have anything left to prove here, it’s time to go.”
At the time, Jackson-Davis didn’t know a fifth season would eventually become an option for players. That change means his Indiana records are now likely to be chased down by the next dominant big man who stays in Bloomington for five years.
For Jackson-Davis, though, the bigger lesson is clear: the next step in his NBA career will depend on continued growth, the same kind of growth he says he should have started sooner in college. He’s already seen how players like Al Horford and Brooke Lopez have extended their careers by adding three-point shooting, and he knows that part of the game still matters.
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