Hoosiers allow second-half comeback

Even with 2:11 remaining, the Hoosiers were up by 11.

After leading with 23 points at the end of the first half, the No. 5 IU men’s basketball team watched its lead get cut in half by a No. 8 Minnesota team determined to battle back after being almost defeated 20 minutes into Saturday’s game at Assembly Hall.

IU turned the ball over eight times in a span of 14:13 during the second half. The Hoosiers scored just three buckets and made 19 of 28 free throws after a Trevor Mbakwe foul with 12:09 left put the Hoosiers in the bonus for the remainder of the game.

But, despite the mistakes, they were still ahead by double digits for much of the half.
IU’s lead would evaporate quickly, though.

Minnesota attacked IU with a full-court press, pushing the Hoosiers close to the baseline corners and either forcing an errant pass or causing IU to step out of bounds.

The Golden Gophers rattled off three consecutive 3-point baskets to cut the IU lead to just six points with 40 seconds remaining. On the following possession, the Hoosiers could not get off a shot, turning the ball over on an errant in-bounds pass from Christian Watford.

With 19 seconds left, junior guard Victor Oladipo nearly gave Minnesota another 3-point play, fouling Minnesota’s Andre Hollins in the act of shooting a 3-pointer — a mistake Oladipo had made twice earlier in the half.

“I was making dumb, little mistakes towards the end of the game,” Oladipo said. “I shouldn’t be doing that. I’m a junior now, and I’m a leader, and I can’t be making dumb mistakes like that.

“To be honest, I felt like I almost blew the game away.”

After Hollins made 2-of-3 from the line, Minnesota was within one possession of the Hoosiers for the first time since the 11:03 mark in the first half.

The Hoosiers in-bounded the ball to senior guard Jordan Hulls, who was quickly fouled by Mbakwe.

Hulls, who had a free-throw career of 87.8 percent coming into Saturday’s game and is one of the best shooters from the charity stripe in Hoosier history, missed the shot.
And, then, he missed again.

“We’ve got to hit those,” Hulls said. “It’s going to get us, if we don’t hit our free throws. Just a lack of focus, I guess.”

Despite his “lack of focus,” Oladipo’s “dumb, little mistakes” and the string of late turnovers and poor shooting, the Hoosiers still came away victorious at 88-81.

Several players said post-game the Hoosiers did not come out with the same energy level on the court that had allowed the them to close the first 20 minutes on a 36-14 run.

“We just have to do a better job of playing the full game,” Hulls said. “We played real well in the first half, and then they came back. We knew they were going to come back and put up a fight. They’re a good basketball team. The second half — we can’t accept that. We know we have to play a lot better.”

In the first half, the Hoosiers proved very efficient with the ball in their hands, dishing out 13 assists with just four turnovers. Whether it was the extra pass on the perimeter to find the open man beyond the arc or a no-look dish from freshman guard Kevin “Yogi” Ferrell in transition, IU had been able to catch the Golden Gophers off-balance.

Ferrell said, though, the team’s second-half performance wasn’t reflective of better play from Minnesota. The Hoosiers just weren’t capitalizing.

“I think it was just more on us,” Ferrell said. “They did a great job pressing, but I feel like it was more on us.We got complacent, especially on our jump shots and our transition defense. It just comes from within. We’ve got to bring our teammates together. That’s how we can have the same burst we had in the first half.”

A previous IU team may have lost Saturday’s game.

Last year, after leading Nebraska by as many as 13 in the second half amid a two-game losing streak that began with a home loss to Minnesota, the Hoosiers faltered down the stretch. They gave up the lead they had held for 31:31 to lose by one in the final nine seconds of the game.

Even this season, IU led Butler by seven points with nine minutes remaining in the second half, and the Hoosiers battled to move the game into overtime before losing a four-point lead in the extra period.

Oladipo said, with this win, he and his teammates can relish the fact they were able to work through adversity. Conference wins, he said, will always be hard to come by.

“I feel good, but, at the same time, I know there’s a lot of stuff we need to work on,” Oladipo said. “There are big games down the road. We have to watch this tape and see what happened in the second half — what we did wrong — and correct it. There’s really good teams that are coming up, and we need to be ready for them.”