Regular season ends in road rout

MADISON, Wis. – The clock ran out on the Hoosiers’ 1-17 conference season Sunday.
There would be a fairytale ending neither to IU’s Big Ten season nor for IU coach Tom Crean’s sideline return to the state in which he coached for nine years.

IU (6-24, 1-17) lost 85-61 to the Badgers on Sunday, marking the team’s 20th loss in 21 games and its ninth straight heading into the Big Ten Tournament.

Crean said his team battled hard and continued to show improvement, but lamented that, “We just don’t have a lot of positive results to show for it.”

The loss also means the Hoosiers failed to win a road game over the course of a season for the first time since 1900, the program’s inaugural year in which they played only five games.

For the fifth time this season, IU was forced to play most of the game without its leading scorer, junior guard Devan Dumes, who sat out after re-aggravating a knee injury Tuesday.

In his absence, freshman guards Verdell Jones (23) and Nick Williams (19) both finished with

career-high point totals in the losing effort. The two guards did most of the scoring for the Hoosiers, including 24 of the team’s 28 points to open the game.

“With Devan being out, Coach put the ball in our hands today,” Williams said. “We were the first two options to score with Tommy (Pritchard) down in the post. And Tommy got in early foul trouble, so we knew we had to score.”

The Hoosiers played the Badgers tight in the first 10 minutes of the game, but trailed at halftime for the ninth game in a row.

Wisconsin built a 17-point lead at the half despite the Hoosiers shooting 60 percent in the period.

Turnovers continued to doom the Hoosiers, who ranked 325th in the nation in the category headed into the game. The Badgers scored 15 points off IU’s 12 first-half turnovers (16 for the game), while Wisconsin only turned the ball over five times the entire game.

Despite the loss, Crean said he is pleased with several individual improvements he’s seen this season, including Jones and Williams, who he said are becoming “bona-fide, both ends of the court type of guys.”

“You can look at the glass half full; you can look at it half empty,” he said. “I choose to look at it half full as much as possible ... though it doesn’t make it any easier as you go through.”

In a post-game press conference, Crean said many of his players are gaining “invaluable” experience that will benefit them next season.

Among the experiences he listed were sophomore walk-on guard Brett Finkelmeier’s first start of his career Sunday, Matt Roth’s 29-point explosion against Ohio State and Pritchard’s presence in the post “since the very beginning.”

“(The experience) is going to help us a lot, just having a year under our belts,” Williams said. “We know we’re freshmen, we know we’re young, but we shouldn’t be playing like this. We’ll have a whole season to work with coaches and get in there ... and some of the things we’re doing this year that are mistakes we won’t be doing next year.”

The Hoosiers will need to upset Penn State (21-10, 10-8) in the opening round of the Big Ten Tournament if they want to extend their season. IU has already lost to the Nittany Lions twice this season, including a 61-58 defeat less than two weeks ago in State College, Pa.