IU coughs up lead in loss to No. 2 Kansas, but finally resembles an NCAA tournament team
The clock hit zero and IU sophomore Malik Reneau’s hands went to his head in dismay. Assembly Hall was finally feeling something it hadn’t felt all day — deflation — and fans were leaving but the IU basketball team still had to congratulate No. 2 Kansas on escaping Bloomington with a 75-71 victory. IU freshman Mackenzie Mgbako is in the handshake line, heading toward the Kansas players, seeing their smiles, and he’s balling up his hands and bringing them to his eyes. He’s crushed, not crying, but this is what heartbreak looks like.
It looks like an IU basketball team playing its best game of the season, in front of the most electric crowd in years, and it still not being enough.
Insider Zach Osterman: IU basketball lets marquee win slip away vs. No. 2 Kansas
IU player ratings: High marks for Trey Galloway, Mackenzie Mgbako
The Hoosiers led by 13 in the second half, and lost. They made as many 3-pointers as their opponent, and lost. They got a career-high 28 points from Trey Galloway, another double-double from Kel’el Ware and another strong game from oncoming freshman Mackenzie Mgbako.
And lost.
This was one of those games — and it hasn’t happened often in the past decade — where Assembly Hall lives up to its billing as hallowed ground. But Assembly Hall could do only so much.
John Mellencamp: The Bluebird, then Assembly Hall
Royalty was in the house: John Mellencamp, Seymour’s own, a former Vincennes student but an IU fan who’d walked into The Bluebird on Walnut Street unannounced on Friday night, playing “Small Town” before his smallest crowd in decades.
Mellencamp was in a much larger crowd on Saturday, as were the top two high school juniors in the state, Trent Sisley of Heritage Hills and Jalen Haralson of La Lumiere by way of Fishers. So was Center Grove football coach Eric Moore, an IU grad, sitting courtside.
Also watching from courtside: IU senior point guard Xavier Johnson, still wearing a walking boot, still out for an undetermined amount of time.
The Hoosiers needed Johnson, especially in the second half as fatigue began to set in on a starting five that went nearly the whole way. Freshman point guard Gabe Cupps played 37 minutes, including all 20 in the second half. Galloway played 38 minutes, including all but the final seven seconds of the second half, after he fouled out because someone had to foul with IU trailing 73-71 and Kansas heading for the basket. Ware played 39 minutes, including all 20 in the second half.
In related news, IU fell apart in the second half.
The emotional waves of Assembly Hall, which had lifted up the Hoosiers for more than 31 minutes and threatened to wash Kansas right out of the building, could do nothing about the exhaustion that cost IU this game.
“I don’t think our defensive intensity was there in the second half,” IU coach Mike Woodson was saying early in his postgame remarks, after IndyStar insider Zach Osterman asked him about Kansas’ late-game momentum swing.
“I thought fatigue set in,” Woodson said another time, asked about the team’s 14 turnovers. “Galloway had three turnovers down the stretch and ended up with five. That’s normally not him.”
As for Ware, who had 11 points and 15 rebounds, he was defending Kansas’ Hunter Dickinson for what Woodson considered two of the Jayhawks’ biggest baskets of the game: A layup with 4:53 left that gave Kansas its first lead at 62-61, and another bucket inside with 2:33 left that pushed Kansas’ lead to 69-64.
Unable to make any more defensive stops, the Hoosiers never again had the ball with a chance to tie or take the lead.
“The two buckets that Dickinson got in the paint I thought was huge,” Woodson said. “I don’t know if Ware was tired at that particular time, but he just didn’t battle him like he did the first half.”
Woodson is picking nits, focusing on two of Kansas’ 26 made field goals, but that’s what a coach does. The rest of us? We can watch this game, digest it, think about it, and come to a conclusion that hardcore IU fans will find unsavory — but couldn’t possibly find untrue:
This was the first game all season where the Hoosiers looked like they might, perhaps, belong in the 2024 NCAA tournament.
Hey, you’re right, nobody wants to hear about moral victories for a program like this one. Would you rather discuss the last game? When IU rolled over in the second half against unranked Auburn and lost 104-76?
“It’s really the first game that we've had — we’ve been in a lot of close games, even the early games we've had — and we didn't cave,” Woodson said.
Yes, he said that.
Trey Galloway, Mackenzie Mgbako emerging
This was the first time all season Trey Galloway has looked like a senior building off his breakout junior season, when he shot a career-best 47.2% from the floor, including 46.2% accuracy from distance that more than doubled his career mark entering the season.
This season Galloway had been shooting a career-low 13.6% on 3-pointers before Saturday, when he was 2-for-4 from distance and was even more effective attacking the rim, routinely swooping into the lane for layups and floaters and double-pump prayers that seem to get answered when he’s the one offering them up.
Mgbako scored all of his 14 points in the first 23½ minutes, his fifth consecutive strong game — he’s averaging 13.2 ppg in that stretch, and 7-for-20 on 3-pointers — after averaging 5 ppg on 1-for-13 shooting from distance in the first five games.
With Galloway and Mgbako supplying the surprise offense, Assembly Hall was supplying the rest. The IU athletic department arranged a “stripe-out,” with entire sections alternating red and white, a breathtaking visual for recruits watching on TV or, like Sisley and Haralson, from the second row. The IU fan base brought the emotion, and for 30 minutes the case of Assembly Hall v. Kansas wasn’t a fair fight.
This was Kansas’ first true road game of the season, and by the second half the Jayhawks were seeing things that weren’t there and hearing things that were, and when Dickinson shot an air ball from 17 feet the building sounded like the world’s largest radio speakers, picking up only static:
Shhawwwwwwwwww!!!
The atmosphere spooked Kansas freshman guard Elmarko Jackson, making his collegiate road debut, into misreading a teammate’s pass that wasn’t tipped. Jackson let the ball fly past, where it landed in the hands of the people who’d made it happen: the crowd at Assembly Hall. Another time, Kansas’ K.J. Adams took his eye off an easy pass, letting it bounce into the Kansas bench. Another time Kansas’ Jamari McDowell was standing out of bounds when he caught a pass.
And then there was the Dickinson 17-footer that went about 15½ feet, and the crowd was letting the Michigan transfer have it. Alas, as the game got away from the Hoosiers, the schadenfreude was getting away from Assembly Hall. Dickinson scored those two big buckets down the stretch, Ware and Reneau combined to miss three contested shots from point-blank range, and Galloway’s final 3-point attempt rimmed out with 23 seconds left.
All that was left was the final score and the postgame handshake. Afterward, giddy Kansas coach Bill Self was directing his players toward the proper tunnel off the court, toward the locker room and the world beyond, while this unranked, 7-3 IU basketball will have to decide where it goes from here.
Find IndyStar columnist Gregg Doyel on Twitter at @GreggDoyelStar or at www.facebook.com/greggdoyelstar.
This article originally appeared on Indianapolis Star: Assembly Hall pushes IU basketball to brink of upset vs. No. 2 Kansas
