Riding high on a three-game winning streak, Indiana lost its momentum in Tuesday night against USC. While the loss doesn’t negate the pair of Quad 1 wins that the Hoosiers earned last week, the nature of the loss made it feel like Indiana will have to hit the reset button before hosting Wisconsin on Saturday.
As was the case against UCLA, Indiana had plenty of chances to win last night’s game. With under a minute to go, Indiana trailed by just two points and was having success pressing the Trojan ball handlers.
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Unlike that game, though, luck was not on Indiana’s side. Whether it was the travel, the ten extra minutes Saturday night, or just an off night, the Hoosiers could not take advantage of the opportunities USC gave them and fell to 6-6 in conference play.
Here are 3 Takeaways from the game:
Secondary (and tertiary) scoring
The biggest development for Indiana over the three game winning streak had been the emergence of Nick Dorn offensively, adding a third threat to the perimeter that overwhelmed most defenses. Of course, Dorn was only the third scoring option because Indiana had been getting good production from Tucker DeVries, the team’s second leading scorer.
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Neither performed well last night, which led to Indiana wasting a 33-point performance from Lamar Wilkerson. Nobody besides Wilkerson reached double-digits, and the only other guy to make more than one 3-pointer was Dorn, who went 2-12 from deep.
Outside of Dorn’s regression back to earth (he was shooting nearly 50% from 3-point range over the last three games), Reed Bailey also struggled against USC’s height. He went 2-6 from the field and only shot five free throws, getting a lot of his inside looks cleanly blocked by the Trojans.
3-Point reliance
The primary reason that Indiana couldn’t get a secondary scorer going was that the shots weren’t falling for DeVries and Dorn, who combined to go 3-20 from 3-point range. DeVries attempted one 2-point shot while Dorn attempted 0.
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There is no reason to think that Indiana won’t have better shooting nights, as the team’s average from Tuesday was well below the season average. That said, it would be nice if the offense showed a little more versatility by this point in the season.
Cold shooting nights will happen, but this team has not proven that it can survive them. Rather than hunt other high-efficiency looks inside, Indiana tried to shoot its way out of trouble last night to no avail.
USC was a tricky matchup in that it has all the size and athleticism Indiana lacks, making it harder to score in the paint (see Bailey’s performance), but it still would have been nice to see something click on offense last night once it became clear that the shots weren’t falling.
The road trip
If you’re an Indiana fan, all you can do is hope that last night’s performance was the product of an unusual college travel schedule, a double overtime game, and a 10 PM Eastern tip time.
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Normally you don’t want to get in the habit of giving your team excuses down the stretch with work to do on an NCAA Tournament bid, but there were a number of things about last night’s game that make it truly exceptional from a college basketball standpoint.
The Hoosiers also did enough in the prior three games to earn some good will. You’d like to see Dorn use his size and athleticism to get to the rim more, but, at the same time, it seems more than likely that 2-12 is going to be an exceptionally bad game from him going forward.
Or, at least, that’s what you hope for! With eight games left to play, Indiana appears to be headed towards another season on the bubble, so any reason for positivity helps at this stage of the season, when all the team needs is wins.
