BLOOMINGTON — Lamar Wilkerson entered Tuesday’s game against Penn State in a bit of a shooting slump.
The Sam Houston State transfer had shot 10 for 29 from the field and 4 for 15 from 3-point range in Indiana’s last two games, losses to Minnesota and Louisville. He scored 15 points against the Golden Gophers and 12 against the Cardinals, but he’s capable of better performances.
Wilkerson snapped out of the relative funk in a massive way against the Nittany Lions. The fifth-year torched them for 44 points, on 16-for-22 shooting with a 10-for-15 clip from beyond the arc. He powered IU to a 113-72 victory at Simon Skjodt Assembly Hall.
“Coach (Darian DeVries) told me that today was going to be the day that I got hot. Because I’d been having a rough couple of games. So he fed me the ball, and then I see one, two, three go in. And after that, they’re just like, ‘Find the hot hand.’ So they kept feeding me, and then shots kept going in,” Wilkerson said after the game. “Hoop looked as big as the ocean today. So I was just throwing it up there, and it just happened to go in.”
Wilkerson achieved several milestones in this performance. He set an Indiana single-game record with his 10 3-pointers, breaking a mark previously held by Robert Johnson, Rod Wilmont, and Matt Roth.
With 44 points, capped off with a free throw to get him there, Wilkerson broke the single-game scoring record at Assembly Hall. Trayce Jackson-Davis set the bar at 43 in November 2021.
Both the points and threes represented career highs for Wilkerson as well.
“I think even for really good shooters, sometimes if you overthink it, you can start to pressure a little bit in your own mind. When he gets one or two down, you can just see it was a relief for him tonight. Then after that it was just fun,” DeVries said. “He’s an important piece, especially for our offense. He draws a lot of gravity for that reason. When we can get him going, then we get one of those other guys going, you can get two of them going on the same night, that’s where offensively you can have a night like this.”
The Hoosiers (8-2, 1-1 Big Ten) went 17 for 31 from 3-point range as a team on Tuesday. The 17 threes ties their third-most in a single game in program history.
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