Indiana University Athletics
GRAHAM: Recent IU-PSU Meetings Not For Faint of Heart
12/3/2018 10:00:00 PM | Men's Basketball
By: Andy Graham, IUHoosiers.com
BLOOMINGTON, Ind. - Count on it to be close.
It almost always is.
Indiana visits Penn State for a 7 p.m. tipoff Tuesday, and here is how the last seven games in the series have gone for IU over the past five years:
2018: W, 74-70 (Home).
2017: W, 110-102 (3 ot) (H); W, 78-75 (Away).
2016: L, 68-63 (A).
2015: W, 76-73 (H).
2014: W, 76-72 (A); L, 66-65 (H).
So while the Hoosiers have gone 5-2 against the Nittany Lions over that stretch, only one game was decided by more than five points – and that one took triple overtime.
Indiana has scored 542 points in those games (77.4 per) and Penn State has scored 526 (75.1). So the average margin is one bucket.
Penn State still has veterans who doubtless harbor bad memories of the last bucket scored during IU's most recent visit to State College: James Blackmon's pull-up, buzzer-beating 3 from the right wing to forge that 78-75 win in 2017.
All the previous games in that span have come following the holiday break, but the Big Ten schedule has shifted from 18 to 20 games, and every conference club is now playing two league games in December.
And given how things have gone so far, IU junior point guard Devonte Green suspects most of those 20 games to unfold like the Hoosiers' 68-66, nip-and-tuck homecourt win over Northwestern that opened league play Saturday.
"It's definitely a reality check," Green said, "because if we're going to be coming down the wire almost every night … every team in the Big Ten is good and every single game is going to be a battle."
Including, one would think, Tuesday's game.
Penn State (4-3) played its first five games without standout junior frontliner Mike Watkins, but since his return last Tuesday against Virginia Tech, the Nittany Lions have shown some significant claw.
VT's Hokies, who came into State College unbeaten and ranked No. 13, hit 10 of 19 shots from 3-point range … and still lost to PSU. Then Penn State opened league play at No. 24 Maryland and only a pair of late Anthony Cowan 3s allowed the host Terrapins to hold PSU off, 66-59.
Multi-faceted 6-foot-8, 230-pound junior forward Lamar Stevens led Penn State's scoring at Maryland, just as he has every other game except the Virginia Tech outing, and is the acknowledged go-to guy for the Lions. He's averaging 22.4 points and 8.6 rebounds. His shooting stroke is reflected in his .809 free throw percentage.
IU senior Juwan Morgan would seem the natural man to match up against Stevens, but Morgan's availability for Tuesday's game is questionable after he exited the Northwestern game with 3:30 to play after sustaining an apparent lower-leg injury.
PSU's Josh Reaves, the 6-5 senior guard who leads the Big Ten in steals with 18 so far this season, averages 11.7 points, 5.7 boards and 3.1 assists. He shoots 48 percent from the field (including 38 percent from 3-point range).
Penn State, like Indiana, has key freshmen starting and coming off the bench. Myles Dread, 6-4, starts and averages 8.7 points, while classmates Rasir Bolton (11.1) and Myreon Jones (4.6) come off the bench. Jones had a breakout game against Virginia Tech with 18 points.
John Harrar, a 6-9 sophomore (4.4) and 6-4 classmate Jamari Wheeler (3.4) join Stevens, Reaves and Dread in recent PSU starting lineups.
Indiana is still sorting out its rotation. Its starting lineup has seemed stable of late – Morgan, Romeo Langford, Justin Smith, Al Durham, Rob Phinissee – but the Morgan injury potentially prompts changes.
Morgan averages 16.3 points and a team-high 8.8 boards and is shooting a torrid .679 from the field (including hitting half of his 18 3-point attempts.) The
Hoosiers have played through Morgan, offensively, much in the way Penn State plays through Stevens.
"You feel really comfortable being able to play through him," IU coach Archie Miller said Saturday, "because he's an unselfish player and he's also a very good one-on-one player. He takes the pressure off the other guys at times. Able to play inside-out. Able to get the ball to the paint where you can collapse them (defensively). Juwan is multifaceted.
"But you've just got to move through (the injury). It's like he fouled out of the game and at that point, in the last three and a half or four minutes, we kind of looked at the group that we had and said, "This kind of how we're going to do it.' And we stuck with those guys and did a good job defensively."
And Langford, the standout freshman who leads Indiana in scoring (18.0), was among those rising to the occasion on both ends Saturday.
A Langford floater in the lane put IU ahead for good with 40 seconds left. And then he knocked a Northwestern pass off Wildcat senior Vic Law's hands to give the Hoosiers the ball back at 0:32.2.
"Juwan went down, got injured, (and) we just knew that it was crunch time and we still got to do what it takes to win," Langford recalled.
Miller was gratified by the Hoosiers' response after the Morgan injury, which obviously had both emotional and practical ramifications.
"Guys made a couple of really good plays," Miller said. "Romeo obviously had a couple big finishes for us in the last couple minutes, stepped up and made plays. And De'Ron (Davis) was really important; I wish I would have played him a lot more. He needed to be in there.
"…It's hard, man, you play a conference game like that this early in the season with that much at stake. It's an intensity level in there that's not like any other non-conference game, really. But I was proud of our guys. We had a lot of guys in there that have never been in that situation before in conference play. So they got some experience today."
The Hoosiers had 13 turnovers Saturday (several coming on a flurry of illegal-screen calls), but made zero over the final 7:08.
And Indiana won despite making just 11 of 18 free throws, a problem area all season, but did sink 6 of 8 in the final 5:03 – starting with a pair of makes from Smith.
"We're shooting free throws every day," Smith said. "We're working on it. It's a big emphasis that coach is putting into practice. And hopefully, as we keep going, we'll get in a groove on the free-throw line and we'll start knocking them down more consistently."
Smith currently has a 1-to-3 assist-to-turnover ratio, obviously not optimal, and the work in that area also continues apace (as a team IU has 123 assists to 124 turnovers).
"Obviously, turnovers are an issue right now," Smith acknowledged, "and we're kind of working just being more in control and making better decisions with the ball … taking our time. Because I feel like, recently, we kind of rushed (things) offensively."
Some of the issues are a result of youth getting its first glimpse of major-college basketball, and the Big Ten wars just up that another notch.
"We're getting completely tested right now," Miller said. "We're learning on the run. This is a great film (from the Northwestern game), obviously a great opportunity to show how we have to play. There were some good things in the game we did."
The testing is sure to continue Tuesday night.
BLOOMINGTON, Ind. - Count on it to be close.
It almost always is.
Indiana visits Penn State for a 7 p.m. tipoff Tuesday, and here is how the last seven games in the series have gone for IU over the past five years:
2018: W, 74-70 (Home).
2017: W, 110-102 (3 ot) (H); W, 78-75 (Away).
2016: L, 68-63 (A).
2015: W, 76-73 (H).
2014: W, 76-72 (A); L, 66-65 (H).
So while the Hoosiers have gone 5-2 against the Nittany Lions over that stretch, only one game was decided by more than five points – and that one took triple overtime.
Indiana has scored 542 points in those games (77.4 per) and Penn State has scored 526 (75.1). So the average margin is one bucket.
Penn State still has veterans who doubtless harbor bad memories of the last bucket scored during IU's most recent visit to State College: James Blackmon's pull-up, buzzer-beating 3 from the right wing to forge that 78-75 win in 2017.
All the previous games in that span have come following the holiday break, but the Big Ten schedule has shifted from 18 to 20 games, and every conference club is now playing two league games in December.
And given how things have gone so far, IU junior point guard Devonte Green suspects most of those 20 games to unfold like the Hoosiers' 68-66, nip-and-tuck homecourt win over Northwestern that opened league play Saturday.
"It's definitely a reality check," Green said, "because if we're going to be coming down the wire almost every night … every team in the Big Ten is good and every single game is going to be a battle."
Including, one would think, Tuesday's game.
Penn State (4-3) played its first five games without standout junior frontliner Mike Watkins, but since his return last Tuesday against Virginia Tech, the Nittany Lions have shown some significant claw.
VT's Hokies, who came into State College unbeaten and ranked No. 13, hit 10 of 19 shots from 3-point range … and still lost to PSU. Then Penn State opened league play at No. 24 Maryland and only a pair of late Anthony Cowan 3s allowed the host Terrapins to hold PSU off, 66-59.
Multi-faceted 6-foot-8, 230-pound junior forward Lamar Stevens led Penn State's scoring at Maryland, just as he has every other game except the Virginia Tech outing, and is the acknowledged go-to guy for the Lions. He's averaging 22.4 points and 8.6 rebounds. His shooting stroke is reflected in his .809 free throw percentage.
IU senior Juwan Morgan would seem the natural man to match up against Stevens, but Morgan's availability for Tuesday's game is questionable after he exited the Northwestern game with 3:30 to play after sustaining an apparent lower-leg injury.
PSU's Josh Reaves, the 6-5 senior guard who leads the Big Ten in steals with 18 so far this season, averages 11.7 points, 5.7 boards and 3.1 assists. He shoots 48 percent from the field (including 38 percent from 3-point range).
Penn State, like Indiana, has key freshmen starting and coming off the bench. Myles Dread, 6-4, starts and averages 8.7 points, while classmates Rasir Bolton (11.1) and Myreon Jones (4.6) come off the bench. Jones had a breakout game against Virginia Tech with 18 points.
John Harrar, a 6-9 sophomore (4.4) and 6-4 classmate Jamari Wheeler (3.4) join Stevens, Reaves and Dread in recent PSU starting lineups.
Indiana is still sorting out its rotation. Its starting lineup has seemed stable of late – Morgan, Romeo Langford, Justin Smith, Al Durham, Rob Phinissee – but the Morgan injury potentially prompts changes.
Morgan averages 16.3 points and a team-high 8.8 boards and is shooting a torrid .679 from the field (including hitting half of his 18 3-point attempts.) The
Hoosiers have played through Morgan, offensively, much in the way Penn State plays through Stevens.
"You feel really comfortable being able to play through him," IU coach Archie Miller said Saturday, "because he's an unselfish player and he's also a very good one-on-one player. He takes the pressure off the other guys at times. Able to play inside-out. Able to get the ball to the paint where you can collapse them (defensively). Juwan is multifaceted.
"But you've just got to move through (the injury). It's like he fouled out of the game and at that point, in the last three and a half or four minutes, we kind of looked at the group that we had and said, "This kind of how we're going to do it.' And we stuck with those guys and did a good job defensively."
And Langford, the standout freshman who leads Indiana in scoring (18.0), was among those rising to the occasion on both ends Saturday.
A Langford floater in the lane put IU ahead for good with 40 seconds left. And then he knocked a Northwestern pass off Wildcat senior Vic Law's hands to give the Hoosiers the ball back at 0:32.2.
"Juwan went down, got injured, (and) we just knew that it was crunch time and we still got to do what it takes to win," Langford recalled.
Miller was gratified by the Hoosiers' response after the Morgan injury, which obviously had both emotional and practical ramifications.
"Guys made a couple of really good plays," Miller said. "Romeo obviously had a couple big finishes for us in the last couple minutes, stepped up and made plays. And De'Ron (Davis) was really important; I wish I would have played him a lot more. He needed to be in there.
"…It's hard, man, you play a conference game like that this early in the season with that much at stake. It's an intensity level in there that's not like any other non-conference game, really. But I was proud of our guys. We had a lot of guys in there that have never been in that situation before in conference play. So they got some experience today."
The Hoosiers had 13 turnovers Saturday (several coming on a flurry of illegal-screen calls), but made zero over the final 7:08.
And Indiana won despite making just 11 of 18 free throws, a problem area all season, but did sink 6 of 8 in the final 5:03 – starting with a pair of makes from Smith.
"We're shooting free throws every day," Smith said. "We're working on it. It's a big emphasis that coach is putting into practice. And hopefully, as we keep going, we'll get in a groove on the free-throw line and we'll start knocking them down more consistently."
Smith currently has a 1-to-3 assist-to-turnover ratio, obviously not optimal, and the work in that area also continues apace (as a team IU has 123 assists to 124 turnovers).
"Obviously, turnovers are an issue right now," Smith acknowledged, "and we're kind of working just being more in control and making better decisions with the ball … taking our time. Because I feel like, recently, we kind of rushed (things) offensively."
Some of the issues are a result of youth getting its first glimpse of major-college basketball, and the Big Ten wars just up that another notch.
"We're getting completely tested right now," Miller said. "We're learning on the run. This is a great film (from the Northwestern game), obviously a great opportunity to show how we have to play. There were some good things in the game we did."
The testing is sure to continue Tuesday night.
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