It's not often that a coach goes back to the drawing board before a game against an opponent with a 1-2 record, but IU coach Mike Davis fully plans on it before Saturday night's home game against Eastern Michigan.\nAfter Wednesday's close loss to Duke, Davis felt his team played well with the exception of the first five minutes, but he expressed concerns about his squad abandoning its commitment to scoring in transition. \n"We have never taken the ball up that slow," Davis said. "We've got to go back to the drawing board and work on getting the ball up quicker and pushing the ball up."\nDavis credited the Blue Devils with doing a good job of limiting transition baskets, but he placed blame on his players for forgetting their identity.\n"We've worked too hard from day one establishing our system and the way we want to play and how we want to play," Davis said.\nDuke head coach Mike Krzyzsewski came into the game not specifically looking to stop IU in transition, but rather to limit 3-pointers. He said he thought his team could keep up with senior forward Marco Killingsworth scoring on the inside, but allowing three-point baskets would give IU too many points to contend with.\nKrzyzsewski acknowledged IU's ability to knock down open looks.\n"Once they start hitting shots, those kids get on a collective thing where anyone on the perimeter can hit," he said.\nThe Hoosiers (3-1) will go up against an Eagles team that dealt the University of California its only loss of the season.\nEastern Michigan has an able big man in 6-foot-8, 255-pound forward John Bowler, who averages 20.3 points and almost 10 rebounds a game.\nAfter a career performance for Killingsworth Wednesday night, Davis said he was pleased with the way that his standout big man played, but he thought the fifth-year senior got tired in the final five minutes of action.\n"I thought some of our guys ran out of gas," Davis said. "We wanted to play at a pace that they couldn't play."
Team refuses to use White's absence as excuse\nAfter suffering a tough defeat to the No. 1 team in the country Wednesday night, Davis and his players could have easily addressed the media with one common theme -- that they were without one of their best players.\nBut they refused to use sophomore forward D.J. White's absence as an excuse.\n"We feel like we're a very, very good basketball team without D.J. White -- we honestly feel that way," Davis said. "We know when D.J. comes back we'll be an outstanding basketball team."\nDavis, instead, pointed to the way his team played the game.\n"We missed some layups, maybe that had something to do with it," Davis said. "We missed some free throws. They got offensive rebounds that we didn't chase down in the corner.\n"We turned the ball over 16 times I think, 14 of them unforced turnovers -- just us being too casual. We're not going to make an excuse about D.J. not being here"
