No celebration for Hoosiers in Champaign

CHAMPAIGN, Ill. – There will come a time this year when the IU men’s basketball team – overmatched and undersized – will take the floor in some Big Ten city and brave the odds to beat a better conference opponent.

Champaign was not that city.

Much as Kentucky had blitzed the Hoosiers (5-10, 0-3) in Lexington, Ky., about a month ago, Bruce Weber’s Illinois squad (14-2, 2-1) put the IU defense to the anvil and hammered away, relenting only in the game’s waning minutes and walking away with a 76-45 win.

But the score, bad as it was, probably won’t irk IU hoops fans quite so much as the manner in which it came.

The Hoosiers lacked focus early and often, and their 3-point defense in the first half existed in spirit only. The Illini made a blinding total of 13-of-25 from behind the arc – many of them uncontested, much like the game itself.

“We never matched that toughness or that mentality that they had,” IU coach Tom Crean said after the game, speaking candidly. “It seemed like, for a while, everything that could be going possibly wrong (did).”

Big Ten games Nos. 1 and 2 really weren’t all that bad, given initial expectations. There was even a quiet, building optimism that this year might not be as bad as once expected.

But with two minutes left in the game and the scoreboard reading more like a video game than a rivalry game, so little had actually gone right for the Hoosiers that it was easy to list: The Hoosiers made it to Champaign; Verdell Jones got a nice homecoming, scoring 10 points and adding four rebounds and three assists in front of a small regiment of fans; IU made it back home.

The list of that which went wrong is substantially longer.

Aside from shooting with a better 3-point statistic (52 percent) than a two-point (51 percent), Illinois scored 31 points off 19 IU turnovers. The final score: 76-45 Illinois, a 31-point difference.

IU grabbed 15 offensive rebounds, – a troubling number for any opponent – yet the Hoosiers only had eight second-chance points. IU tallied just nine assists to counter those 19 turnovers, while Illinois notched 17 assists to just nine giveaways.

A team that has at times made its living on the run, IU scored no points on fast breaks.
You see where I’m going here.

After the game, IU players joined coach Tom Crean in their determination that this sort of loss should never be repeated.

“We’re not going to change what we’re trying to do,” Crean said. “There’s time to look at improvement, and there’s time to tell it like it is. As I said in the locker room, we were never tough enough today to earn a shot at this win.”

Nick Williams, IU’s leading scorer Saturday with 12 points, said the players would talk amongst themselves Saturday night and Sunday in an effort to reform some of these wrongs. Williams spoke like a man determined never to absorb a beating like this again, an important attitude for this young team.

Still, Williams recognized that in most ways, the Hoosiers orchestrated their own demise.
“They jumped on us early, and obviously we didn’t handle the pressure,” he said after the game outside the locker room. “Most of it was us; some of it was their pressure.”
And then, without pause, Williams moved in the only real direction open to him or this team right now – forward.

“We’ve just got to get better tomorrow.”

See you then.