Reactions can reveal a lot about a team.
When IU men’s basketball coach Archie Miller walked into his press conference shortly after his team’s 70-55 loss at Purdue on Saturday, one of the first things he said was, “I thought for the most part, especially in the first half, our guys really competed hard.”
That should be a difficult reaction for Hoosiers fans to accept.
Even that small morsel of praise was far too kind of Miller.
Maybe senior forward Juwan Morgan’s response to the embarrassing loss at the hands of his team’s arch nemesis was a bit more fitting.
“At the end of the day, a loss is a loss,” Morgan said. “We can’t really take moral victories.”
It was a challenge that should’ve been retaliated against with fire and passion but instead was met with the same low-level energy.
For the second game in a row, short of a few short stretches, there were barely any moral victories to be taken away from the way it played, let alone any actual victories in the end.
Whether it was the droll and sleepy-eyed outing delivered by freshman guard Romeo Langford, or the Hoosiers combining to shoot just 38 and 20 percent from the free throw line and behind the three-point line respectively, everything about IU’s performance was downright shoddy.
In a conference where anybody can seemingly beat anybody, Saturday’s game was just another excellent opportunity at earning a desperately-needed Big Ten victory.
Yet those opportunities, which are going to keep popping up in every game as the season continues, are only valuable when the Hoosiers take advantage of them.
Against the Boilermakers, they didn’t really come close to doing that.
So that has to beg an important question about this IU team — are the Hoosiers not driven enough to seize these opportunities or are they just incapable of doing so?
It’s starting to look like the latter is the sorry truth.
It starts with the Hoosiers’ leading scorer, Langford, who ended up having by far his worst game in the cream and crimson, finishing with just four points on 2-10 shooting and 0-4 shooting on free throws. He was a step behind all night and his weaknesses, such as a slowly disappearing jump shot and lapses on defense, presented themselves throughout.
Regardless, we’ve seen Langford have a solid freshman season so far and a bounce-back game in the near future should almost be expected.
It’s the supporting cast outside of Langford and Morgan that continue to underwhelm.
Beyond sophomore forward Justin Smith, IU’s role players looked more out of place and outclassed than they have in any other game this year except maybe the one earlier in the week against Nebraska.
Players like senior forward Evan Fitzner and junior center De’Ron Davis are rapidly becoming afterthoughts and dwindling down the team’s depth in the process and some of their other teammates aren’t far behind them on that path.
Despite all this team’s shortcomings, those have all been evident for a while now. It comes down to how the players and coaches respond to those weaknesses that will define how the rest of this season goes.
Saturday could have been just another epic battle in what is the cornerstone rivalry of this state. Even if IU came out with just a close, hard-fought loss in a tough road environment, if the Hoosiers came out with their energy amped up to the maximum and battled the entire contest, that would have been a step in the right direction.
Yet here they are, stuck in the same rut as before.
There were plenty of reactions from during in the game that showed the differences between the two squads.
With around nine and a half minutes to go, Langford went up for a shot near the rim that he usually finishes with ease, but this time was blocked by Purdue freshman Aaron Wheeler.
Langford and Miller both looked at the referee, both arms in the air, looking for a foul call.
IU is the state’s inferior team as it stands right now.
And until the Hoosiers find a new approach to important games like this, they’ve got a long way to go until that changes.
