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Thursday, March 28
The Indiana Daily Student

sports

COLUMN: IU wins bizarre, comical and ultimately insignificant game

IUMBB Penn State

NaCl.

The chemical formula of sodium chloride is NaCl. What this scientific term essentially translates to is table salt.

Salt is in everything — seawater, your food and my analysis of the IU-Penn State basketball game.

What we just collectively watched over a period of three hours was thrilling, absurd and bordering on the impossible. The Hoosiers won, which is fine and dandy, but ultimately their victory should be taken with the ultimate grain of salt.

They could have easily lost. Freshman center De’Ron Davis could have easily missed one of his free throws at the end of the regulation. Junior point guard Josh Newkirk’s fingertip may have been touching the ball at the end of the first overtime when he tied the game.

Yes, IU won, but it was against Penn State in Simon Skjodt Assembly Hall in a game the Hoosiers led by nine at halftime. The fact is, this win may not be replicable.

Sophomore big man Thomas Bryant put up 31 points. Junior guard Robert Johnson and Newkirk both had 27. IU carved up Penn State’s defense. The problem is the Nittany Lions did the same against the Hoosiers.

Perhaps the glaring flaw for IU right now is its inability to stop the opposition. In the last three games the Hoosiers have given up almost 87 points per game. They’re usually able to put points on the board, but with their constant defensive lapses there’s a definitive ceiling to this team.

Freshmen Lamar Stevens and Tony Carr carved up the Hoosiers consistently.

Constant switching led persistent gaffes by the IU defense. On the other side of the ball, motion still seems hard to find.

Plenty of possessions at the end of regulation and the first two overtimes resulted in inept isolation ball. We’ve seen this in the losses as well. The Hoosiers ultimately got lucky Wednesday.

Hoosier basketball at the moment is the definition of a bubble team. They’ve had some tremendous victories early on in the season that could sneak them into the real tournament come March. This is accompanied with some brutal losses that could be the major factor sending them to the NIT instead of the Big Dance.

Against Penn State, IU did its best to encompass every major theme of the season. Bryant playing monstrously to blunders on both sides of the ball to a raucous crowd to an unsatisfying game conclusion.

IU Coach Tom Crean’s squad had 23 turnovers and still won. If that’s not a microcosm of what the Hoosiers have been through during the 2016-17 campaign, nothing is.

The Hoosiers are good.

We’ve known that for quite some time. They can get hot any night and have the star-power to match up with anyone in the Big Ten.

IU is also relentlessly mediocre at times, as the Northwestern and Michigan losses in the past week showed.

This game, as interesting and curious as it was, gave us nothing new. All we can do is take this 110-point outburst and victory with a grain of salt.

It seems appropriate with this Hoosier team that this outlandish and inexplicable game provides us with nothing.

It’s an enjoyable victory, but when we look back at the season, that’s all it’s going to be — a peculiar victory in a less-than-peculiar season.

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