Bloomfield's Blake Neill, Averaging 28 Points, Earns HBM Top-60 Honors

Twenty-eight point two points per game. That number sits alone at the top of Indiana's scoring charts and makes the central argument for why Bloomfield senior Blake Neill belongs on Hoosier Basketball Magazine's Top-60 roster for the class of 2026. HBM released the list Wednesday alongside its late-season magazine, where Neill was pictured on the front cover among 17 honored seniors, and with the recognition came an invitation to the Top-60 Senior Workout at Marian University in Indianapolis on April 12.

Neill earned every digit of that average through a scoring toolkit Bloomfield built its half-court offense around. At 6 feet 6 inches and 200 pounds, the senior shooting guard converts size into creation advantage in three consistent ways. He isolates on smaller Class 1A defenders and attacks the rim with enough length to finish over early help. When the drive closes, he retreats to pull-up jumpers in the mid-range, a secondary action that defenses had to respect enough to go under screens or trail him off the block. And when opponents compressed the lane to take away both, Bloomfield found him off off-ball screens for catch-and-shoot looks from the perimeter. Work through all three options in sequence, and you still have a player who topped 44 points in a single game and posted 30-plus multiple times throughout the season.

The postseason proved the numbers were not a product of soft scheduling. In the Class 1A South Regional on March 14, with Bloomfield's season against Northeast Dubois, Neill scored 28 points in a 46-37 win that pushed the Cardinals to the South Semi-State. He did it against a defense already schemed to compress his first options, and it is exactly that playoff film, high volume against focused opposition, that HBM evaluators weigh when assembling a Top-60 panel. Bloomfield finished 18-8 behind an offense that consistently ran through its best player and made no apology for it.

College evaluators at Marian on April 12 will run a tighter version of that same test. The HBM event draws small-college, mid-major, Division II, and NAIA programs precisely because it concentrates the state's top seniors in one gym. Two sessions run from 1 to 3 p.m. and 3:30 to 5:30 p.m., and HBM has framed the workout around the state's two most prolific scorers: Neill at 28.2 and Indianapolis Attucks standout DeZhon Hall at 27.7.

The standing evaluator question for any high-volume small-school scorer applies here with full force: does isolation creation that dismantled Class 1A defenses survive college-length athletes who can challenge at the rim and close out faster on the perimeter? Does the rebounding that Bloomfield coaches point to as evidence of Neill's two-way value carry over when he is no longer the biggest wing on the floor? Neill enters the spring contact period without a college commitment locked in, with summer camps and the workout circuit still ahead. The HBM Top-60 honor gives him the platform. What he does on April 12 at Marian may determine who shows up at those summer camps ready to offer an answer.