It seems appropriate that in a season marred by miscues, injuries and all-around confounding play, the IU basketball season came down to a double foul.
At the 44-second mark of the second half, down by five, IU big man Thomas Bryant attacked the paint. Purdue’s forward Caleb Swanigan stood in his way.
One official saw a blocking foul. The other called a charge. Eventually, they decided two fouls were better than one and tossed both players out of the game with their fifth fouls.
“I’ve never seen a double foul out like that, especially involving two key players near the end of the game,” said Bob Hammel, former sports editor of the Bloomington Herald-Times and member of the Indiana Basketball Hall of Fame. “It was a bizarre happenstance.”
“A bizarre happenstance” doesn’t just describe that one play. It describes the entire season for Hoosier basketball.
At halftime at Assembly Hall, IU lead 36-32.
The home team ended up losing, again, 69-64.
This is the team’s 12th conference game and its seventh loss in conference play. At one point No. 3 in the nation, IU Coach Tom Crean and company have steered their ship directly into the metaphorical iceberg.
They’ve attempted to stay afloat with sporadic wins, including a three-game winning streak against Rutgers, Penn State and Michigan State in late January, but the holes are too glaring and the water is unceasing.
Déjà vu. That’s how the Purdue game felt for its entire duration.
We’ve seen this game and many of its ilk over and over again.
IU takes a lead early on and stretches it into the beginning of the second half, yet the persistence of the opponent and the wilting of the Hoosiers in the final stretch routinely prove to be too much.
With three minutes and 49 seconds left, the game was tied. I’m confident in this fact because I wrote it down knowing that this final gasp against Purdue might be the final gasp for IU’s relevancy in the 2016-17 season.
This final fragment came immediately after a blonde IU fanatic rejected a Purdue devotee on the Assembly Hall Kiss Cam. This was reverse foreshadowing because the Boilermakers ended up blocking the Hoosiers’ hopes of a successful season and spot in the tournament.
The double foul was a brutal call, but it doesn’t change the fact that once again the Hoosiers didn’t know how to close at home against a team they could’ve undoubtedly beaten.
Perhaps the most telling play was at the 29-second mark with IU trailing by four. Junior guard Josh Newkirk attacked the basket with reckless abandon. The key word there is reckless.
He tossed the ball at the rim in a way that’s reminiscent of a clown throwing a pie whilst tripping on a banana peel.
It was just a mess.
The ball was rebounded by junior guard James Blackmon Jr., who promptly got fouled.
He then missed the first free throw.
They’re 25 games into the season, and it’s these possessions that sum up the year for the Hoosiers. Close, odd and, at the end of it all, a loss.
The fans were loud, IU led for a large portion of the game, and there was a chance to beat a ranked opponent at home to garner some momentum over the last breath of the season. Once more, the Hoosiers didn’t take advantage of the situation.
After the loss, a visibly and rightfully frustrated James Blackmon Jr. took his seat in front of the press.
“Just the mistakes we made,” the junior guard said in regards to what needs to improve for IU’s impending rematch against Purdue. “We gotta be better with the ball, knowing their tendencies now. We’ll be ready for them the next time we play them.”
This is the right approach, but sometimes it doesn’t matter how ready they are. They have to finish the game and make the plays when it counts.
IU didn’t do that against Purdue. It didn’t do that against Wisconsin. It hasn’t done that many times this season.
With six games left, four on the road, it’s about to be too little too late for IU. Big Red had their chance and, just like against Purdue, it lost it.
That’s where the 2016-17 season seems to stand, “a bizarre happenstance” in which the Hoosiers weren’t good enough.
gigottfr@indiana.edu
@gott31
