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Friday, March 29
The Indiana Daily Student

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Hoosiers take a step back at Michigan Thursday night

Junior guard Robert Johnson drives to the basket against Michigan in a loss Thursday. Johnson led IU in scoring with 14 points.

A season ago when the IU men’s basketball team visited Ann Arbor, Michigan for its annual showdown against the Michigan Wolverines they went on a 25-0 scoring run and put away the game early in the second half.

Thursday night when the Hoosiers returned to face the Wolverines, they found themselves down 25 points with 13 minutes to play in the game.

IU wasn’t trailing by a substantial amount because they weren’t making their shots, but rather because it struggled to hold on to the basketball and failed to execute on defense. Michigan shot a blistering 63 percent from the field and torched IU by 30, 90-60 at the Crisler Center in the third worst conference loss of the Tom Crean era.

“The last 13 minutes of the first half was a one point game," IU Coach Tom Crean said on the IU postgame radio show. "We got off to such a bad start and the scoring wasn’t the issue, it was lack of them feeling us defensively.”

The Wolverines shot the ball well out of the gate and the Hoosiers found themselves down 18-4 after the first seven minutes of play. Michigan’s ball movement and balanced attack was able to carve up the sloppy IU defense and knock down 11 of 20 shots from beyond the arc.

IU only made it easier for Michigan as the Hoosiers' turnover woes from earlier this season returned Thursday night. After the Hoosiers committed a season-low nine turnovers against Michigan State Saturday, it seemed as if the issues were being corrected. Instead, IU coughed the ball up 16 times and Michigan turned that into 28 points on the other end in the 30-point victory.

IU turned the ball over on 27 percent of its possessions while Michigan was steady on the offensive end and only committed five turnovers on the night leading to just four Hoosier points.

Sophomore forward Zach McRoberts earned his second consecutive start after playing 32 minutes against Michigan State and posting a plus-12 rating for IU when he was on the floor. On Thursday the sophomore transfer only played 18 minutes and failed to score or record an assist. Freshmen forward De’Ron Davis and guards Devonte Green and Curtis Jones, who have seen their minutes rise over the past couple of games, were nonfactors, combining for just five points.

“I had some of the wrong people in there,” Crean said. “And we’re going to figure out how that’s going to work and it’s not just freshman.”

A mixture of poor ball handling and ghostly defense plagued the Hoosiers, though they were still efficient shooting the ball. Junior guard Robert Johnson paced the IU offensive attack with 14 points and sophomore center Thomas Bryant poured in 13 points of his own on 6 of 7 shooting.

However, junior guard James Blackmon Jr. was missing in action as the Michigan defense completely took the reigning co-Big Ten player of the week out of the game. After attempting 31 shots over the past two contests and tying his career high Saturday with 33 points, Blackmon Jr. shot the ball just three times against the Wolverines with zero 3-point attempts.

Blackmon Jr. made two of those three shots and finished with four points while adding three rebounds and a team high four turnovers. His performance Thursday night tied for the lowest scoring output of his career and was the first time all season he didn’t hit double digits.

After a sluggish start to the conference season, the Hoosiers had been winners of four of their last five and trending upward, but the loss to Michigan quickly moves them back to .500 in league play. Crean said his team needs to find leadership in order to succeed on the road and said he consideredThursday night's a step in the wrong direction.

“Bottom line is every time we take a couple steps forward and you don’t have natural leadership, I'm learning you end up taking a step back,” Crean said. “We took a step back from that tonight and we had nobody bringing that fighting rage and it wasn’t even close to what it needed to be.”

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