CHICAGO - This is what freshman guard Robert Johnson dreamed of growing up.
He and his Hoosier teammates will play Maryland at 6:30 p.m. in the third round of the Big Ten Tournament. They’re playing with not just a conference tournament game, but a NCAA Tournament bid on the line.
Knowing that, Johnson said the Hoosiers are “desperate” for wins, before adding that he means that in a good way. It puts a certain pressure to perform in a win-or-go-home tournament that he said is special to college basketball.
He wouldn’t have it any other way.
“This is something every kid grows up talking about — basketball in March,” Johnson said. “It’s definitely going to be a good time playing Maryland. We’re going to just go out there and play hard and let the chips fall where they may.”
Junior guard Nick Zeisloft said the Big Ten Tournament gave IU a fresh start to reinvent itself, in a way. That showed in the Hoosiers (20-12, 9-9) renewed dedication to the defensive end.
“I guess you can see we hit the reset button,” Zeisloft said. “But it’s not just that. This time of year, it’s one (game), and if you lose, you’re done. That’s really what it comes down to. You’ve got to go out there and get the W no matter what you’ve got to do.”
Having had a double-bye, the No. 2-seeded Maryland Terrapins (26-5, 14-4) spent the week knowing they had the potential to play four different teams.
Maryland Coach Mark Turgeon said on the Big Ten teleconference the double-bye gave his team more chance to heal up and recover from various illness and nagging injuries.
“This is great for me because I don’t know who we’re playing, so we’ll just work on us,” Turgeon said earlier this week. “A lot of times coaches screw around and work so much on other teams, they don’t concentrate on themselves. We’ll just concentrate on us.”
Maryland won’t likely need to have changed too much in practice. The Terrapins have virtually locked up an NCAA Tournament bid already and flew into Chicago Wednesday on a seven-game winning streak.
The Hoosiers and Terrapins are already familiar with one another. Each held serve at home in two regular-season matchups with IU coming up just short in the second game where junior guard Yogi Ferrell had two chances to win or force overtime at the buzzer.
“Yeah, we play Maryland a third time, both times have been close,” Ferrell said. “We know they’re a great team They’ve got great guards with Dez Wells and Melo Trimble, great bigs inside. So it’s all about diving into that film and taking away some of their tendencies.”
Friday’s winner will advance to the Big Ten semi-finals to play the winner of the Ohio State-Michigan State game which will tip off 25 minutes after the Hoosiers and Terrapins finish.
The latest projections from bracketmatrix.com — a site which aggregates 107 NCAA Tournament bracket projections — lists IU as the second-to-last team to make the field only ahead of BYU.
Purdue, which plays Penn State 25 minutes after Michigan and Wisconsin finish their game at noon, is just two spots ahead of the Hoosiers.
“We know the position we’re in,” freshman guard James Blackmon Jr. said after scoring 25 points against Northwestern on Thursday.
“We’re not really thinking about it. We know that we can win these games, though, and that’s what we’re going to try to do.”
