CHICAGO — Down the stretch this season, Indiana men’s basketball has been the cat with nine lives.
The Hoosiers have suffered a tailspin since mid-February, losing six of their last seven games. So many of those contests carried “must-win” labels, with the team hovering around the NCAA Tournament bubble. IU dropped every significant game in that stretch, along with some that should’ve been simple.
Winning even one of those contests might have Indiana in decent shape to make the field of 68, with a particularly weak crop of fellow bubble contenders.
But on Wednesday at United Center, the cat finally ran out of lives. The Hoosiers lost the latest game they had to have, falling to Northwestern 74-61 in the Big Ten Tournament. They won’t be mathematically dead until a bracket is released without Indiana’s name in it, but make no mistake: this group has run out of opportunities.
“We all came here wanting to lay the ground work for this program and the culture and really set the tone, but just down the stretch of the season, we weren’t able to capitalize on some of the opportunities we had,” fifth-year Tucker DeVries said after the game. “It really sucks that none of us are really going to put this uniform on again for a regular season or this tournament. It is what it is, but it’s really frustrating.”
Indiana (18-14) entered Wednesday’s game as the last at-large team in the field on Bracket Matrix.
Other teams on the bubble have faltered throughout IU’s losing streak, keeping it in the picture despite its struggles. But this team’s performance in the second half against the Wildcats should remove all doubt over whether or not it belongs in the NCAA Tournament. The Hoosiers looked checked out as Northwestern (15-18) just punished them on both ends of the floor.
Indiana didn’t look like a team that’s played together for five months Wednesday, much less a team whose season was on the line.
“I just feel like we just got stagnant. We just weren’t playing our best basketball. The other team that we were playing, they executed well. They did what they had to do. We made a lot of self-inflictions that cost us the games through that last stretch,” fifth-year Lamar Wilkerson said. “We just weren’t hooked up like we were supposed to be.”
IU head coach Darian DeVries couldn’t answer whether his team would accept any bids to other postseason tournaments like the NIT or the College Basketball Crown. He said he’d have to talk to his coaching staff, his players, and IU administration to determine those next steps.
DeVries hasn’t given up hope for his Hoosiers to still get to March Madness, and he made his case to the NCAA Selection Committee after the game. He referenced their difficult schedule (ranked 34th-hardest in the country on KenPom) and their quality wins over Purdue, UCLA, and Wisconsin. But it’s a feeble resume, and the team has repeatedly stumbled in its recent opportunities to prove its mettle on the court.
“I certainly think there’s a case there. Whether it ends up being enough, we’ll see,” DeVries said. “That’s something that I think this team, they’ve gone through it this year. They’ve continued to fight and battle and came away with some good wins along the way to back that up.”
The postseason uncertainty is part of what made Wednesday’s second half so tough for some IU players to endure.
The Hoosiers just couldn’t string together enough quality possessions, both offensively and defensively, to stop the bleeding. Northwestern went on a 15-3 run over a 4:10 span, and that extended to a 22-5 run over 6:44 of game time.
Senior forward Sam Alexis showed frustration on the court before checking out with just under nine minutes remaining. He never returned to the game.
“It’s frustrating because you don’t know if this is your last game. It’s just frustrating, even when I was on the bench for the last couple of minutes. Even when I was in the game, I don’t feel like I was doing much well either,” Alexis told The Daily Hoosier in the locker room after the game. “It was just frustrating just to see something I couldn’t really control.”
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