Column: Victory against Penn State allows IU to regroup

Coaches are famous for saying you can only beat the next team on your schedule.

After a home loss last week to Wisconsin, the Hoosiers could not have planned for two better opponents than Northwestern and Penn State to appear next on their schedule.

No offense to Northwestern or Penn State, but even if their star players were available instead of injured, the teams would have only been competitive against IU at best.
In a lot of ways, you can call the past two games “rebound games” for IU, but I’d prefer to look at them as work games.

Losing to Wisconsin at home sent a jolt through the entire IU basketball team because the Badgers walked away from Assembly Hall with a win by out-shooting and out-working the Hoosiers – something that rarely happens in front of the Bloomington faithful.

Beginning with No. 13 Michigan State on Sunday, the Hoosiers are now entering two of the hardest weeks on their schedule as they play MSU, Purdue, No. 2 Michigan, Illinois and No. 14 Ohio State during that span.

What IU needed to do after its loss to Wisconsin was refocus on some of its recent weaknesses, like bench scoring and defensive discipline, while getting back to the things that made them successful in the first place. Wednesday night’s 72-49 victory over Penn State successfully capped a two-game stretch where IU was able to accomplish those things.

“You can’t get too high and you can’t get too low,” IU Coach Tom Crean said. “You have to take each game for what it is, the most important game, because if you spend too much time celebrating one or you spend too much time dreading the result of another, you can get in a slide in a hurry in this league.”

First, let’s start with the bench.

After posting back-to-back scoreless performances against Minnesota and Wisconsin, Will Sheehey used the past two games to regain his scoring stroke.

On Sunday, Sheehey recorded six points against Northwestern and was noticeably more active on the offensive end.

Against Penn State, Sheehey played with the same kind of emotion that we are used to seeing from the 6-foot-6-inch forward.

In the first half, Sheehey scored eight points, including two 3-pointers, while leaving his fingerprints on the game with his hustle. He finished the game with 12 points, one steal, two assists and two rebounds.

“I thought he was extremely good on Sunday at Northwestern, even though it wasn’t a box score good necessarily, but it was a very, very strong game from him,” Crean said. “He’s one of our best players. He really is. I think that he’s an excellent shooter, he reads the game well and that’s how he played tonight.”

The rest of the bench did not play as well as Sheehey – going scoreless against Northwestern and producing only 14 points against Penn State – but Sheehey’s aggressiveness was critical to the Hoosiers’ success.

When he plays with passion, the energy of the crowd and the team gets amped up another notch, especially on defense as IU smothered Northwestern and Penn State.

Defense has been a point of emphasis for the Hoosiers all season, but the loss to Wisconsin reinforced IU’s need to fine-tune the little things within its defense.

Last week, Crean talked about how IU defenders were over-helping on defense, which led to open shots for Wisconsin.

After allowing Wisconsin to hit seven 3-pointers, IU locked down the perimeter, forcing Northwestern and Penn State to combine to shoot 8-of-33 (24.2 percent) from three-point range.

“Points don’t win games, it’s your defensive effort,” Sheehey said. “When you talk and are active on defense, that’s what propels winning.”

Playing solid team defense and getting contributions from the bench will be essential to IU’s success over the next two weeks.

One-by-one the Hoosiers will be facing the Big Ten’s most elite teams, but Crean said he isn’t worried about his team’s ability to focus on the match at hand.

“They’ve never played with the intention of the next game being on their mind other than the game that they are in,” Crean said. “Sometimes when you are older and sometimes when you have a lot of expectations on you and you play in a league like this, you can look at the schedule and you can lose sight.

“Well, those teams get beat.”

Luckily for the Hoosiers, these “rebound games” acted as a buffer to allow IU to catch their collective breath without looking to the tough games ahead.

From here on out, IU will be under the microscope in the biggest environments the Big Ten has to offer, but as always, the next game on the schedule will be the only one that matters.

­— mdnorman@indiana.edu