BLOOMINGTON — The variance extremes Indiana basketball endured Saturday, in one of the Hoosiers’ final pre-Christmas signoffs, a 78-58 win against Chicago State, offered a timely reminder as we collectively cast an eye toward the resumption of Big Ten play in two weeks.
At its best — so, particularly at home — Darian DeVries’ team can score the ball with devastating efficiency. And still, the Hoosiers, like any team that binds its fortunes to its ability to make 3s, will live on a precarious ledge a lot this season.
It will be DeVries’ job to ensure, when the Hoosiers fall off, that the landing is not too painful.
“I know we’re a 3-point shooting team. That’s what we do,” DeVries said. “But our mindset has to be, regardless of shots falling, our defense has to keep us in the game. …
“I give our guys some credit there.”
Games like these tell us very little about the quality of teams like those. Indiana (9-3) and Chicago State are so dramatically separated in talent, in resources, in expectations, that individual performances can rarely be taken at face value.
What we can discern, at least at some base level, are a team’s operation mechanics. Do they work? Do the players involved stick to the right principles? Do those yield the desired results? Does that manifest itself in an expected level of dominance?
For 20 minutes Saturday, the answer to those questions was a resounding yes.
Indiana attempted 26 3s to just six 2s in the first half. Not because the Hoosiers got trigger happy, but because the offense took Chicago State (2-11) so easily apart that these were simply the best shots for a team of very good shooters to choose from.
And IU got the results it would’ve hoped for. The Hoosiers hit 14 of those 3s, in just 20 minutes of game time. Six different players hit a 3 in that stretch, and three hit two or more. Lamar Wilkerson looked like threatening his 11-day-old program record of 10 made 3s in a single game, piling up five makes in quick success in the first half Saturday.
“The shots we got in the second half were the same ones in the first half,” DeVries said. “We were getting really good, clean looks by some of our best shooters.
“It was one of those halves.”
The whipsaw effect was pronounced.
Indiana missed its first 16 3s, again, most of them quality looks generated within the flow of an offense designed to find those shots for these players.
As a team, IU hit just 1 of 20 3s after halftime. DeVries admitted later he started encouraging his team to push the ball into the paint, an adjustment that ensured — even through those shooting struggles — Indiana was never really stressed Saturday.
It is not difficult to look at this team and recognize its shooting talent. It’s also not difficult to see what holds the Hoosiers back: length, athleticism, an opponent talented enough to pressure the ball without fouling, and make the kinds of breakdowns that collapse a defense for kickout opportunities difficult to generate.
An afternoon like Saturday reminds of something even more fundamental. That a team built to live so extremely by the sword as Indiana will sometimes risk dying by it.
This offense’s reliance on the 3-point line will make for a handful of breathtaking performances — including a couple already in the ledger — by the time this season ends. Saturday’s second half served as our latest proof that the opposite will also occasionally be true.
That even in the absence of stifling defense, a good shooting team can just lose its touch. And this one can do so dramatically enough to stall out offensively.
“The easy thing to do is say, ‘Hey, let’s get more paint touches, go drive it,’” DeVries said. “The hard thing to do is when you got a guy that if he’s wide open he’s making 7 out of 10 3s.
“It’s finding that balance of, I don’t want them to hesitate, so you want them to stay confident. It’s also after awhile, if we’re not making them, we have to be able to get in (the paint).”
Perhaps this is unsurprising. There is an extent to which this is an oversimplification, or at least a statement of the obvious. But it’s likely, as we cycle the calendar back toward Big Ten play, that we’re going to see Indiana do this again in games far tighter than this one.
That there will be nights when the Hoosiers’ impressive combination of ball movement, body movement, clever scheme and shooting ability just buries a completely overwhelmed opponent.
And that there will be nights, too, when not much about the process changes, and yet the outcome could not be more dramatically different.
IU got what it paid for Saturday — a cheap and easy win. The Hoosiers have one more nonconference game, Siena on Monday, before a brief break around Christmas. DeVries plans to have his team back in Bloomington by Dec. 27, with a week and a day to prepare for Washington on Jan. 4.
He’ll want to see the same unflinching confidence he did, and praised, Saturday. And the same response defensively, when shots stopped falling.
There are obviously things a coaching staff can do — repetition, form, scheme — to improve on poor shooting performances.
But when the rubber meets the road, there’s only so much you can do about a slump. Not because these Hoosiers shoot too many 3s, but certainly because they shoot so many. That that did not cause undo stress on Saturday afternoon does not mean a sterner opponent might have made life more difficult.
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This article originally appeared on Indianapolis Star: Slowdown of record shooting pace a cautionary tale for IU, one it proved it can solve
Reporting by Zach Osterman, Indianapolis Star / Indianapolis Star
USA TODAY Network via Reuters Connect
