BLOOMINGTON — If IU women’s basketball didn’t make its struggles to begin the season obvious last Monday, Thursday’s game left no doubts.
These are not the same Hoosiers of the last several years. Their 72-68 overtime loss to Harvard made that obvious. For a majority of the night at Simon Skjodt Assembly Hall, Teri Moren’s team looked out of sync, undisciplined, and both slower and weaker than the Crimson. It was IU’s first regular-season home loss since Feb. 2022, its first to a non-conference opponent since Dec. 2021, and its first to a non-conference opponent outside a power conference since Dec. 2018.
Moren displayed palpable frustration after Monday’s game, but on Thursday, she remained calm.
“I don’t think anybody has hit the panic button quite yet,” Moren said after the game. “There’s new pieces that we’re trying — and they’re all trying to still figure out how that all works together. And it may not happen as early as our fans and maybe as we would like, as quickly as we would like. But we have to stick to the process of just trying to improve a little bit more every day.”
Harvard (2-1) completely dominated for several periods of the game, and IU (1-1) couldn’t sustain enough positive stretches to overcome it. The Crimson earned this victory, which will serve as a major stock-booster later in the season. They’re a top-100 team in the country, but ranked No. 91 in Bart Torvik’s T-Rank after a 23-point loss over the weekend at Quinnipiac. This could end up being a very bad loss for Indiana.
But it’s more than simply the result that’s alarming for the Hoosiers — it’s the way they got there. They turned in a jarring performance on Thursday, one that’s uncharacteristic of Moren’s program.
Indiana committed 27 turnovers, its most in a single game since Dec. 2016. Harvard’s press defense flummoxed the Hoosiers all night, and that’s something they’ve regularly struggled with in recent years. It prompted a familiar refrain in the postgame press conference: IU spent plenty of time preparing for the pressure, and wasn’t surprised by it, but just couldn’t handle it with any poise.
And while the Crimson may have thrown Indiana some unexpected looks with that press, IU rarely had an effective strategy for breaking it. On too many in-bounds plays, Chloe Moore-McNeil couldn’t get open from a double-team or got trapped in the backcourt after receiving the ball — and her teammates simply didn’t help. IU players remained problematically stationary in those press breaks, and it led to turnovers. It got even worse when Yarden Garzon tried to break the press, and she finished with a team-high seven turnovers.
The disconnectedness showed up in all facets of Thursday’s game. The Hoosiers’ timing on passes and cuts was off, they allowed backbreaking defensive lapses, and they made so many poor decisions all over the floor. IU got away with those things against Brown, perhaps to a lesser extent, but it got worse on Thursday.
“We obviously didn’t start the way we wanted to,” Garzon said. “I feel like we need to come back to practice, in the lab, understand what we’re doing wrong. Our defense has got to get better. We can’t turn over the ball so much. We can’t let other teams beat us up.”
Indiana struggled mightily from 3-point range on Thursday, with a 3-for-18 clip. Those shots will start falling, eventually — IU’s shooters are too good to not figure things out at some point.
But the offensive issues go beyond shots not falling and turnovers. Moore-McNeil, Garzon, and Sydney Parrish combined for one field goal in the entire overtime period on Thursday. Lilly Meister has shown promise, but those three are IU’s three returning starters and proven scorers, the type of players a team should want taking big shots in close games.
Additionally, Penn State transfer Shay Ciezki has had trouble settling in through her first two games at IU. Ciezki is talented, shooting 38.9 percent from 3-point range in her two years with the Nittany Lions, and her speed is a real weapon in transition. But against Brown and Harvard, she’s had some spacing issues, her 5-foot-7 frame has caused some problems defensively, and she’s 0 for 6 from beyond the arc so far.
The Hoosiers may not need Ciezki to be the game-changing sharpshooter that Sara Scalia was, but they need her to play better than she did in the first week of the season.
IU also has depth issues with Lexus Bargesser and Lenée Beaumont both unavailable. The backcourt has been thin without them, and Ciezki and Moore-McNeil’s slow starts have only exacerbated that problem. Henna Sandvik made a clutch offensive rebound late in the Harvard game, but she’s otherwise largely struggled to make an impact off the bench.
Indiana no longer has the security blankets it had the last few years. Throughout the successful run from 2021 through 2024, if all else failed offensively, IU could dump the ball off to Mackenzie Holmes or Grace Berger and tell them to figure something out. More often than not, they made things happen.
This team has good players, but it lacks an alpha at that level. There’s nobody on the roster, at this point, who can reliably score points for Indiana when nothing else is working. And Moren’s squad is crumbling without those fail-safe options available.
“This is not the team it was a year ago,” Moren said. “We have a lot of room to improve and grow, and we will. This is a team full of competitors. It may take us a minute, a couple games — I hope it’s just a couple — to start figuring some things out. I feel like we’re better shooters than we displayed tonight. It’s disappointing.”
This IU team didn’t enter the season with the same target on its back and the same expectations as its previous iterations did. Internally, the Hoosiers obviously believed they could do big things this year, and surely, they still do.
But this wasn’t a group expected to challenge for a Big Ten championship the way it did the last four years. IU was picked to finish fifth in the preseason Big Ten poll, and appeared solidly in the conference’s second tier behind newcomers and national title contenders USC and UCLA. The Hoosiers looked more like a good-not-great team that should be competitive in the Big Ten, return to the NCAA Tournament, and give itself a chance to advance a round or two.
Losing to Harvard doesn’t rule out any of that from happening, but expectations for IU clearly need to be lowered.
This team has the pieces, the talent, and the coaching to be good this season. But these aren’t the same Hoosiers who reached three Sweet 16s in four years. Holmes isn’t putting on a uniform to rescue them.
Indiana has a lot of issues to work through, and it’ll need to happen quickly, before things spiral out of control.
The Hoosiers return to the floor on Wednesday at Butler (FloSports, 7 p.m. ET) before returning home to face Stanford on Sunday (FS1, 2 p.m. ET).
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