Insider: IU's trip to paradise turns into nightmare

LAHAINA, Hawaii — A trip once seen as an opportunity for Indiana to make a national statement had turned into a holiday nightmare by dinner time Wednesday.

Instead of returning home with NCAA tournament-quality wins, the Hoosiers bring back only old flaws and fresh doubts about the direction of this season that, until this week, held great promise.

Sloppy turnovers, missed free throws and wasted momentum haunted No. 13 Indiana (4-2) for all 40 minutes Wednesday, in a 72-69 loss to UNLV. The Hoosiers will finish sixth in this year’s Maui Jim Maui Invitational.

“I know everybody will be looking forward to the time (in Hawaii), and certainly we have Thanksgiving,” IU coach Tom Crean said, “but I'll be looking forward to our next practice.”

Insider: Issues remain in IU's victory

Indiana’s worst start of the week nearly sank the Hoosiers before they could find any offensive rhythm.

A flood of turnovers, and more problems defending the paint, handed UNLV early momentum and built a 27-12 deficit for an Indiana team that looked totally out of sorts at both ends of the floor.

The Hoosiers rallied behind 3-point shooting in both halves — grad transfer guard Nick Zeisloft hit five over the course of the game and led Indiana with 17 points off the bench.

But 21 turnovers, 34 UNLV points in the paint and a 10-of-19 team performance from the free-throw line put up a hurdle too tall to clear.

Wednesday’s result ended a week that could hardly have gone worse for the Hoosiers. A win over a St. John’s team in the midst of a total rebuild, sandwiched between losses to Wake Forest and UNLV, left Indiana limping back to Bloomington.

Crean attempted to cut off any talk of a confidence crisis Wednesday.

“We’re six games in. It’s the end of November,” Crean said. “They’ve got a lot of improving to do, and I think the confidence will come from the improvement.”

Whatever IU’s long-term prognosis, it’s reality Wednesday was painful.

Crean brought his team to Maui in 2008, when his IU tenure was just a few games old. Those Hoosiers were inexperienced and overmatched — mirror opposites of the group he traveled west with this week — and left with the same tournament record: 1-2.

Some of Indiana’s problems, namely defense, are long-standing. The Hoosiers allowed Wake Forest and St. John’s to score more points per possession than their season averages.

And some are new, though equally concerning.

Any complaints about turnovers last season were unfounded, as the Hoosiers gave the ball away on just 17.2 percent of possessions. Nearly every member of IU's backcourt returned this season, making it hard to understand how or why that number has spiked to 23.9 percent, one of the worst team averages in the country.

“I feel like (UNLV) didn’t do too much of anything,” sophomore guard James Blackmon Jr. said, regarding his team’s 21 turnovers Wednesday. “It was us that made turnovers that we could have prevented.”

Speaking to the same issue, Crean said the Hoosiers were "trying to make plays that weren't there."

He might as well have been addressing the larger problem.

The critical question Crean faces, with Indiana confronting a potentially serious gut check before Thanksgiving, is which problems are fixable, and which are not.

He said he and his staff would analyze all six of the Hoosiers’ games over the coming weekend, with Alcorn State on tap Monday and a trip to Duke up two days later. On what they find, Indiana’s season will turn.

A trip that could have announced Indiana as a serious national player instead ended in frustration. It’s too early to declare this season in peril, but whatever momentum and good feeling IU brought to Hawaii has washed away, replaced by fresh doubts about Indiana’s program, top to bottom.

It was, in the end, as bad as a trip to Maui could go.

Follow Star reporter Zach Osterman on Twitter: @ZachOsterman.

Alcorn State at Indiana, 7 p.m. Monday