Indiana men’s basketball flew to The Bahamas this past week with a concrete goal: prove something in the Battle 4 Atlantis.
Well, it did.
The Hoosiers play a pretty soft nonconference slate. The meat of it is already in the rearview mirror before the end of November. The thesis was simple: blow out the buy game opponents in Assembly Hall and win a big game or two in Atlantis. Or even just keep one of those two games close.
To start, Indiana was paired up with Louisville. Makes sense. The programs are in the same neighborhood and share recruiting regions, a fair amount of history and culturally aren’t all that dissimilar.
That was always going to be a potentially dangerous matchup for the Hoosiers. The Cards shoot 3s at an alarming rate. All kinds of teams have been able to exploit Indiana’s overhelping tendencies to get open looks from the arc and Louisville took that to the extreme in a blowout loss.
But it wasn’t just the long ball. Indiana’s defense looked horrible that entire game. The Cards were able to generate some good looks at the rim and in transition while Chucky Hepburn, formerly of Wisconsin, locked up the Hoosiers’ entire backcourt for 40 minutes.
Whenever Indiana tossed the ball into the post or drove to the paint, Louisville was more than ready with multiple defenders. It completely knocked the Hoosiers off their game with passes sailing into opposing players’ hands or out of bounds entirely.
It’s arguably Indiana’s worst performance in the Mike Woodson era. Even more so than Auburn last year for the way Louisville was able to push the lead before the result looked marginally more generous down the stretch.
Going into the event, the general line of thinking was Indiana would need to get past Louisville to get a chance at Gonzaga, the real analytics prize in the field. Play close or even beat the Zags and you can leave feeling good about yourself.
As fate would have it, Gonzaga got upset in its first game by an upstart first year West Virginia team, so the Hoosiers got that chance anyway.
… and with it lost in blowout fashion. Again.
Indiana found shades of something on offense that game. Oumar Ballo looked like the best player in the country for a stretch, not missing a single shot and causing problems every time he got the ball. But that was, again, a stretch. Indiana ended up getting blown out. Again.
The Hoosiers got a small consolation prize in the form of an 89-73 win over a Providence team that was both missing probably its best player and had been playing a pretty late game the previous night.
There were a lot of problems that were simply exposed in The Bahamas.
Louisville was able to find every open shot it wanted on offense. Mark Few was openly talking about exploiting Indiana’s defensive scheme with Ryan Nembhard. Gonzaga had an open man available right under the rim what felt like every other possession as its ballhandlers found whatever they wanted on the perimeter.
The backcourt minus Trey Galloway simply wasn’t able to contribute offensively. Myles Rice scored 3, 6 and 2 points in each game in the Bahamas after putting up over 20 in the previous two. He wasn’t finding enough opportunities and nothing was falling when he did. Kanaan Carlyle still looked like a guy finding his role before being sidelined with an injury against Providence.
This team just did not look ready to play. At all.
Indiana will leave Paradise Island having fallen around 20 spots in KenPom. Not ideal.
Look, there are worse places to be than 52nd in KenPom in November. All Indiana can do now is get back on track and run up the score on its four remaining buy games and start off Big Ten play on the right foot at home against Minnesota and on the road against Nebraska.
The Hoosiers showed they could obliterate a lesser opponent against Eastern Illinois. Then showed they could take the foot on the gas and fall backward into a full 40 minute game against UNC Greensboro.
Indiana has showed it can pick up the pieces and improve midseason before. It happened back in 2022-23, Woodson’s best season at the helm by a healthy margin.
But at some point the fanbase is going to become sick of tuning in every winter to find the Hoosiers losing by 20+ to another name brand squad. That is if they didn’t pay money to make the trip out there.
