LINCOLN, Neb. – The immediate aftermath of such a shellacking would feature no sugarcoating. In the moments after defeat – the first in the Big Ten this season – Mike Woodson didn’t pull any punches.
“Our bigs played well, but we got nothing from our perimeter play,” Woodson said in his postgame radio spot with Don FIscher, the voice of the Hoosiers who’d just narrated the beatdown at the hands of Nebraska – now on equal footing at 2-1 in conference play with Indiana.
He’d then transition to the postgame interview dais, where the theme would be more of the same. In describing the production he got from his backcourt Wednesday night – or as his criticism offered, the absence of such – the word he would repeatedly land on was ‘awful.’
“We gotta be better on the road and in managing the game,” Woodson told reporters moments later. “I just thought our perimeter play… I thought Gabe (Cupps) played well for us in the minutes that he played, but other than that, from a perimeter standpoint, we were awful.”
Wednesday night fell in a lengthening line of performances in which the Indiana’s (10-4, 2-1) backcourt has been outclassed. But this instance was perhaps the most severe by disparity in counting stats.
Pick an eye-popping statline from the Huskers’ final box score, and it belonged to one of a number of backcourt options for Nebraska that emerged victorious in every facet of battle when compared to IU’s stable of guards.
28 points for Keisei Tominaga, including 18 in the second half. 15 points for Brice Williams, who also did most of his damage in the final 20 minutes after limited minutes due to his foul trouble in the first half. Jamarques Lawrence had 12. CJ Wilcher had all 11 of his points in the first half, and while dealing with injury in the final 20 minutes of the contest, his contributions would not be needed as the Cornhuskers strided away down the stretch.
Compare those numbers to the ones the Hoosiers’ compiled as a unit, and the alarms sound once again.
Trey Galloway had 10 points and three of IU’s 19 turnovers on the evening. Xavier Johnson, whose return was much-anticipated and thought by many to be a potential boost to the IU unit, only added four turnovers while posting a zero in the scoring column over sporadic minutes of play.
“Our starting two guards were awful tonight,” Woodson added. There’s that word again, this time specifically at the expense of his frontline with 10 years of college basketball experience at the one and two-guard positions. “Xavier, I know he’s been rusty and hasn’t played. 14 minutes, didn’t give us much at all. Galloway didn’t give us anything until late when it was too late.”
Five points from Cupps and three from CJ Gunn and Anthony Leal each. For the purpose of keeping track, that’s a 21-66 difference. That, in both understatement and reality, will not play in a winning recipe.
Even in an apparent down year for the conference as a whole, the chances of scraping past with blemishes that large on your resume is slim. When the task is already as tall as winning on the road in the Big Ten, attempting to do so by giving away possessions and not finding any perimeter scoring in the ones you do keep is the type of combination that, most often, earns the result IU did in Lincoln.
There’s far too much trust in the current selection of guards for the production to have such inconsistency about it. Two and a half weeks ago, Galloway nearly single-handedly earned Indiana what would’ve been its best win this season in a heroic effort versus Kansas. Although the desired result didn’t come, the fourth-year senior guard appeared to be turning a corner in what had been an up-and-down campaign leading into the contest.
Xavier Johnson’s late-season stretch, now two seasons in the rearview mirror, helped elevate Indiana to the positive side of the NCAA Tournament bubble and end a seasons-long drought to make it there.
But what was true in the past, whether it be two weeks or two years ago, can’t hold significance now if the outputs don’t build on those foundations. In the Hoosiers’ 14th game of the 2023-24 season and the first of 18 straight in the league to close the regular season calendar, IU’s backcourt found itself at the mercy of another collective unit which was able to punish them in ways they couldn’t counter.
In truth, yes – there were struggles to manage in defeat up against Nebraska. But Indiana, whose final lead of the evening came with 14:20 to go in the first half, was more reactive than proactive. Opportunities to control an outcome often don’t come to the team trailing on the scoreboard. In avoidance of said fate, more needs to be done on the front end to prevent the other team from capitalizing on misfortunes.
Johnson and Galloway are this team’s captains. On that pedestal, they’re as emblematic of the Hoosiers’ performance as they are a symbol of Woodson’s trust. This past offseason, Indiana either was unsuccessful or passed altogether on the idea of bringing in anyone else to be in this role. These baskets, in the hands of Johnson, Galloway and others, are the ones in which the Hoosier backcourt’s eggs will lay.
The subject to mostly rightful scrutiny on Wednesday night, a continuance of this type of play later into the Big Ten calendar would be inadequate of what a winning team desires.
Indiana has seen it before from these ball-handlers, "it" being the ability to impact winning and create more favorable instances to do so.
But it will need to see it more often, for the sake of its own reliance and credibility in this setting going forward.
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