Good basketball can be contagious. Shots falling and good performances, despite the outcome, have the ability to alter the course of a season. Indiana’s valiant effort on the road against Purdue last Friday night provided a glimmer of hope for the rest of the season.
All of the momentum gained turned into a distant memory during Wisconsin’s 76-64 beatdown of Indiana in a matter of minutes. It soon became only the beginning of another perplexing 40 minutes of basketball.
“You figure we have a game like we did at Purdue where we really competed for 40 minutes, and then we come in here and we lay an egg based on how we started the ball game,” Indiana head coach Mike Woodson said postgame. “You spot teams on the road 20, it’s going to be tough to get back in them.”
It is always going to be a herculean task for Indiana to beat Wisconsin in Madison, Indiana laid an egg from the jump as the Badgers went on a three-point brigade to open the game, making six of its first seven from deep.
As Indiana piled on misses, it allowed the Badgers to push the tempo, scoring all 11 of their fast-break points in the game’s opening minutes.
A shell-shocked Indiana team looked lost on both ends and found itself in a 22-point hole, trailing Wisconsin 26-4 a mere six minutes into the game.
“I thought Malik and Ballo did an awful job in terms of guarding the bigs,” Woodson said. “We were terrible in transition early; they got a few there. But you figure if you can take some of those away, you’ve got a game.”
After making a jaw-dropping nine threes, Wisconsin eventually cooled down from deep, granting Indiana an opportunity to work out of the gargantuan hole.
To its credit, Indiana fought back, grasping some momentum and slicing its deficit by a dozen to trail by 10 at the half.
However, the momentum Indiana built up once again proved to be short-lived, in part due to its lack of ability to control the ball.
Indiana committed five turnovers by the first media timeout of the second half,. Those turnovers led to eight Badger points, and the hosts ballooned their lead out to 19 in the opening five minutes of the half.
The Badgers’ early half kill-shot slashed out whatever hope Indiana had left, leaving the Hoosiers licking its wounds for the final 15 minutes of yet another blowout defeat on the road.
“I thought we were better in the second half in that regard,” Woodson said of the defense. “But the first half put us out of the game basically, because it was tough getting back after that.”
Following Tuesday’s loss in Madison, Indiana dropped its sixth in seven tries, fell to 0-2 in the month of February, and is swiftly slipping out of consideration for an at-large bid to the NCAA tournament.
“We’re running out of games,” Woodson said. “I have to figure these next eight games out because it’s going to be very pivotal for our basketball team in terms of making tournament play.”
Momentum can very well turn on a dime, but if Indiana is unable to hold serve at home against Michigan on Saturday afternoon, the season will officially be on the brink.
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