LOS ANGELES — Indiana basketball looked like a team ready for some home cooking on Tuesday night.
The Hoosiers (15-8, 6-6 Big Ten) capped off a six-day trip to the West Coast with an 81-75 loss to USC at the Galen Center. Two days earlier, they won a double-overtime game against UCLA that proved taxing for a team only rotating eight players.
“Just couldn’t get it going,” IU coach Darian DeVries said. “I don’t know if the heavy minutes the other night had anything to do with it. I thought the guys prepared well, I thought we had a good two days of practice and they were really engaged. I thought they were ready, just didn’t quite have it tonight.”
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While IU trailed the entire second half and faced an 11-point deficit with 3:46 to go, it still managed to take the game down to the wire. The Hoosiers went to a full-court press down the stretch and gave USC similar problems to the ones they had earlier in the trip against the Bruins.
Tayton Conerway even had a chance to make it a one-point game with 31 seconds remaining, but missed a free throw looking to complete a 3-point play.
“They continued to battle, trying to find ways to get it going, a few different times,” DeVries said. “Kept fighting.”
DeVries said his team played a “half step slow” while pointing out they didn’t have the same “tenacity” as they did while building the three-game winning streak that ended Tuesday night. That lack of energy created problems in a wide variety of areas with DeVries rattling off a few that included allowing free runs at the basket, slow rotations and not going strong enough for defensive rebounds.
The fact that it was still a winnable game left IU players all the more frustrated with their performance.
Lamar Wilkerson, who scored a game-high 33 points, had little to say about his third 30-point performance of the season. He found no silver lining when everyone knew they didn’t play up to their potential.
“It was everything, man,” Wilkerson said. “It was just one of those games, man. I don’t like to make excuses but it’s a hard trip, man. That’s why a lot of people that come out here aren’t successful on these two-game road trips in California. We’ve been out here for a week, tired, fatigued, stuff like that. I don’t make excuses for us, we got to be better.’
Michael Niziolek is the Indiana beat reporter for The Bloomington Herald-Times. You can follow him on X @michaelniziolek and read all his coverage by clicking here.
This article originally appeared on Indianapolis Star: Indiana basketball falls short vs USC on West Coast trip: ‘It’s a hard trip’
Reporting by Michael Niziolek, The Herald-Times / Indianapolis Star
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