Following the loss to Nebraska, IU men's basketball coach Tom Crean talked about dealing with adversity.
Crean said he is comfortable when things seem to be going wrong and added that difficult stretches will always need to be overcome through the course of a season.
That adversity continued against Louisville on Saturday as the Cardinals’ defense outclassed the Hoosiers and IU dropped its second straight game.
But, Crean wasn’t willing to say his team was in the midst of a crossroads after the loss, even with No. 13 Wisconsin coming to Simon Skojdt Assembly Hall Tuesday.
“I think that's pretty drama-filled right there,” Crean said. “No, we just lost to a really good team. We didn't play well the other night.”
While IU’s defense of its Big Ten title didn’t get off to the best start with the loss to Nebraska, beating Wisconsin, one of this year's conference favorites, would go a long way toward getting the Hoosiers back on track.
Wisconsin is 12-2 this season and its only losses were at Creighton on November 15 and against North Carolina in the Maui Invitational. The Badgers come into Bloomington riding an eight game winning streak, but none of those wins came against a team that is currently ranked.
The Badgers opened up conference play with a 72-52 win over Rutgers.
After the Hoosiers struggled mightily against Louisville’s tough defense, Wisconsin offers the IU offense another chance to test itself against strong opposition. The Badgers currently have the eighth best defense in the country in terms of points allowed per game.
The main difference between the Louisville defense and Wisconsin’s defense is three-point shooting. Louisville stymied IU’s three-point shooting and the Cardinals boast the second best three-point percentage allowed in the country. Wisconsin, however, is 168th in this category, allowing teams to shoot 34.7-percent from three.
Even if IU can’t get its offense going, Crean said the real problem with his team is how they let the offensive play affect their mentality on the other end of the court.
“When we're not shooting the ball well, okay, we have got to outgrow quickly, alright, not playing as well as we need to play on defense," Crean said. "We might have been better today but we still lost the game by a margin. If there's a common theme in when we struggle, it's when our shooting is not where it needs to be, and we don't continue to come down there and just bust out those stops.”
Both sides of the ball will need to improve against Wisconsin after each struggled in the past two games. But the players said they aren't focused on the past two games.
“We can't look in the past or go back to games that we can't control,” junior guard James Blackmon Jr said. “We've got a great coaching staff, and we've just got to buy in and have a short-term memory and get a win on Tuesday.”
