Indiana basketball's loss at Wisconsin a tale of two teams, and a stylistic mismatch

Indiana basketball’s loss at Wisconsin a tale of two teams, and a stylistic mismatch

Posted by author February 5, 2025 Basketball

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MADISON, Wis. — Indiana basketball lost quietly Tuesday night, 76-64, at No. 19 Wisconsin. Here are three reasons why:

Wisconsin basketball’s opening blitz

Wisconsin wasted no time switching on its superpower Tuesday night, hitting six 3s in the first seven minutes of the game.

That raced the Badgers (18-5, 8-4 Big Ten) out to a 26-4 lead that set the terms for the rest of the evening’s events. Buried under that shooting flurry before it could even get its feet under the table, Indiana spent the rest of the cold, dark Wisconsin night punching up at an opponent honestly sort of taken out of its game by how well it started.

If anything, Wisconsin’s blistering start seemed to sort of freeze the hosts, who could not sustain that white-hot shooting and seemed instead to sort of struggle with whether to stick or twist in trying to really wipe IU (14-9, 5-7) out.

The Hoosiers didn’t wilt, to their credit. They understood the task, attempting just one fewer 3 (15) than Wisconsin in the first half. But they made just four to the Badgers’ nine. A poor shooting team playing from behind on the road against a good one is a recipe for trouble, and IU found some in Madison.

The 3-point gap

It was always going to be a talking point Tuesday night.

Indiana has struggled from distance — either in volume or accuracy, or both — for years now. The Hoosiers have changed coaches, changed rosters, changed offenses and kept missing 3s while taking too few of them. They are outside the top 300 nationally in both points scored behind the arc and percentage of overall field goal attempts from range.

Wisconsin is, this season, everything IU is not. The Badgers live behind the line, as evidenced by that stunning start to the first half. They entered play Tuesday making more than 36% of their 3s, and scoring 37% of their points from behind the arc. Both numbers rise noticeably against Big Ten opponents.

And so it was Tuesday. Wisconsin built its lead from 3 and kept its lead from the same. And when the Badgers went cold in the second half, missing nine of their first 10 attempts from distance, Indiana’s struggles became magnified — IU shot 1 of 8 from 3 in that stretch.

This always looked like the stylistic difference maker in this matchup, and it was.

An Indiana basketball season slipping away

The promise of that 9-1 stretch between the last game in Atlantis and the USC win at home is gone now for Indiana.

Mike Woodson’s team has now lost six of seven. Whatever credit it got for its effort in West Lafayette on Friday dried up in the face of that ugly breakdown early in Madison. The Hoosiers’ analytics aren’t those of an NCAA tournament-caliber team. Neither are their wins, nor their recent performances.

Much was made of this season’s promise, of significantly improved NIL resources enabling Woodson and his staff to retain the quality he wanted and add what Woodson needed. Yet this team too often repeats the mistakes of Indiana teams in the recent past, and if results do not improve quickly, it will go the way of those teams as well.

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