BLOOMINGTON — Indiana head men’s basketball coach Mike Woodson wouldn’t disclose his halftime message to his team on Sunday. But whatever he said clearly resonated.
IU slogged through the first half against Eastern Illinois at Simon Skjodt Assembly Hall and went into the locker room down at halftime. But the Hoosiers who returned for the second half looked like a completely different team, and they cruised to a 90-55 victory.
The result won’t alleviate Woodson’s concerns about the beginning of the game, though. He called it an understatement to say Indiana (2-0) didn’t play as hard as he wanted them to in the first half.
“I thought we were still home in the bed sleep. It was awful,” Woodson said after the game. “You got to give Eastern Illinois credit because they played hard and made shots. I thought our defensive intensity was just lacking the first half. We adjusted the second half, and guys came out and got after it. Couldn’t ask for a better second half.”
IU did shoot 57.1 percent from the field in the half and out-rebounded Eastern Illinois. But the Hoosiers committed eight turnovers in the first 20 minutes, with plenty of unforced errors. And as Woodson said, they looked lethargic defensively and allowed the Panthers to score 1.121 points per possession in the first half, with two players in double-figure scoring by halftime.
Indiana displayed some concerning tendencies in its season-opener against SIU Edwardsville, but staring at a halftime deficit against Eastern Illinois — the lowest-rated team on KenPom that IU faces all season — served as a wake-up call.
“Nobody expected that team to come out and be up on us at halftime. When we went back to the locker room, everybody was really locked in, like, ‘This should never happen,'” freshman Bryson Tucker said. “Any team we play, you don’t want to go down at halftime. So we just came out with a whole different level of intensity (in the second half), and we really locked in.”
Indiana didn’t immediately turn things around in the second half. It took a few minutes to get things going. But once the Hoosiers started to figure things out, they never looked back. They regained the lead just over three minutes into the half, and extended it to double-digits 3:30 after that.
IU’s defense was vastly improved after halftime, boosted by improved energy levels. And that spilled over onto the other end of the court, as the team also started to lock in even more on offense. The Hoosiers shot 64.7 percent from the field in the second half while scoring 1.543 points per possession, and they held EIU to a meager 16.7 percent and 0.5 PPP.
Tucker scored 12 points in the half to join Mackenzie Mgbako (18 points), Malik Reneau, and Oumar Ballo (17 points each) as IU’s double-figure scorers for the game.
“I felt like we started to play together, play as a unit. We emphasized that going into halftime, but it really happened on the defensive end. We start pressing, up to touch on everybody, and they didn’t get a glimpse at the rim. Everybody was up pressuring the ball, and I think that changed the game for us,” Reneau said. “And then just opened up free runs down the middle, over-the-top passes, advance passes for threes and stuff like that. I think our defense just took another notch in the second half to open up everything on the offensive end.”
Nobody is reasonably expecting Indiana to be perfect in early November. Every team — whether it’s the best in the country, the worst, or anything in between — is working through things at this point in the season.
As rough as the Hoosiers looked in the first half, the way they flipped the game around in the second half has to be encouraging. Woodson’s most successful IU teams have relied on strong defense, and in the second half on Sunday, this group showed potential to play at that type of level.
“It’s a good thing when you can hold teams to 18 points in a half. That doesn’t happen very often in college basketball,” Woodson said. “Those guys in that locker room after our halftime talk, they stepped it up and they made catches tough. They made it tough to swing the ball.”
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