BLOOMINGTON — Coming off an encouraging road win at Iowa, Indiana women’s basketball turned in a disappointing performance.
The Hoosiers had some old issues resurface on Thursday in a 68-54 loss to Illinois at Simon Skjodt Assembly Hall. IU (12-5, 4-2 Big Ten) got off to a rocky start, as the Fighting Illini (13-4, 3-3) scored 25 points in the first quarter and built a double-digit lead that kept them ahead for the rest of the night.
IU head coach Teri Moren and her squad have to regroup quickly, with No. 4 USC coming to Bloomington on Sunday.
Here are three main takeaways and observations from Thursday’s game.
A bad matchup
Indiana has had some trouble against Illinois ever since Shauna Green took over as Fighting Illini head coach ahead of the 2022-23 season.
IU is 3-2 against Illinois since then, with this being a second consecutive defeat. The three Hoosier wins in that span were all tight affairs they had to grind out at the end, sometimes unexpectedly.
Green has done a nice job with her program, earning an NCAA Tournament bid in her first season and then winning the WBIT last year. But while the records and achievements still rank below what the Hoosiers have accomplished in the same time frame, Illinois’ roster has just been a bad matchup for them.
“They’re great at getting downhill. They have some really fast guards that get downhill. We have the size advantage over them, but it’s tough when they’re getting downhill, and we can’t seem to stop them,” IU graduate student Sydney Parrish said after the game. “They had 25 points in the first quarter. That led us to being down the rest of the game. We have to come out a lot harder, I think.”
The speed Parrish mentioned is the biggest thing Indiana struggles with against Illinois. Illinois has one of the top bigs in the Big Ten, as Kendall Bostic entered Thursday tied for the conference lead with 11.2 rebounds per game. But IU held an edge in that facet with Mackenzie Holmes in previous seasons, and the tandem of Lilly Meister and Karoline Striplin are at least bigger than Bostic.
But athleticism has been one of IU’s biggest weaknesses for several years. Even when Indiana won the Big Ten in 2022-23, it lacked the sort of quick, speedy guard who could blow by everyone offensively and keep up with anyone defensively. And that’s what Illinois has typically leaned on the last few years, between Genesis Bryant, Adalia McKenzie, and Makira Cook (who is out for the year and didn’t play Thursday, but has given IU problems in the past).
This IU team is sometimes most comfortable in transition, particularly when Shay Ciezki is running the floor. And it became apparent very quickly on Thursday that the Hoosiers wouldn’t have the legs to push the pace like that against the Illini.
Illinois’ speed also caused issues for IU’s defense. Moren said her players need to guard better, but added that she and her staff could’ve done a better job adjusting during the game.
“I think from our (the staff’s) standpoint, we probably needed to make earlier adjustments with their zoom action that they continued to run. We tried a couple possessions of zone and they knocked down shots,” Moren said. “We got to continue to get better at all of it.”
Concerns against physicality
One of the overarching issues this game illuminated was Indiana’s issues against physicality.
Illinois played aggressively from the beginning of the game, frequently bumping IU players on both ends of the court and initiating as much contact as possible. Indiana players hit the floor hard on several occasions, and Parrish limped off after one such fall and missed a few minutes of action. The Illini benefitted from a lax officiating crew that didn’t blow the whistle on a lot of potential fouls.
Both Moren and Illinois head coach Shauna Green regularly expressed frustration with the referees throughout the evening Thursday. Moren, particularly, had trouble getting officials’ attention during timeouts to get explanations on various calls or non-calls. At one point, she had to cross through a line of cheerleaders and wave her arms around in the air to get one of them to notice her.
Illinois finished with 15 fouls, while IU accumulated 14. But Moren felt the officials put her team in harm’s way.
“I thought Illinois came out from the beginning and established how physical the game was gonna be. And there were a lot of moments, I’m not going to lie, that I didn’t feel protected in that,” Moren said. “I didn’t think our kids — for our kids — I feel like we weren’t protected. And that’s disappointing. That’s not why we lost the game, though.”
But officiating aside, this isn’t a new problem for the Hoosiers. During their non-conference slump at the beginning of the season, they similarly struggled to match their opponents’ physicality. That’s also part of what made the difference in IU’s 11-point loss to UCLA, though there’s only so much Moren’s team can do against someone as big as Lauren Betts.
Still, this is a legitimate concern for Indiana going forward. Illinois isn’t the first team to test IU’s physicality this season, and plenty of other Big Ten teams will continue doing that the rest of the season. And Moren knows her team has to perform better against that style of play.
“It’s probably something that they got to look at from an individual perspective and realize that teams are going to be physical with us,” Moren said. “And we have to be able to be as physical back. And not allow them to not allow us to get to our spots and where we want to be.”
Red flags in practice impact lineup decisions
Two key starters, Meister and Yarden Garzon, were noticeably absent as Indiana tried to complete a comeback in the fourth quarter.
Meister and Garzon played only three and four minutes, respectively to start the third quarter, and both sat on the bench for the rest of the game. Moren didn’t make any substitutions in the fourth quarter, riding with Parrish, Ciezki, Striplin, Lexus Bargesser, and Chloe Moore-McNeil.
Moren confirmed that neither Garzon nor Meister suffered an injury, and offered some blunt criticism for both players — particularly Meister.
“They are not injured. They’re fully healthy,” Moren said. “Yarden had a hard time guarding. We had to get stops, and she had a time guarding, and No. 24 (McKenzie) went right at her. So we had to get a more athletic lineup on the floor just to try to do a better job defensively. Lilly has to better. She has to be better offensively, she has to be better defensively. And here, as of late, she’s just been OK. And we don’t need an OK Lilly. We need a really good Lilly to help us, cause we have to have great balance.”
Moren also expressed disappointment with the team’s Wednesday practice ahead of this game.
She said some of her players displayed poor energy and focus during Wednesday’s practice, and added that this wasn’t necessarily the first time that’s happened. She didn’t call out anyone by name when talking about those practice concerns, but it’s easy to connect the dots.
Moren said she spoke up about it, herself, while also leaning on player leadership — specifically Parrish, Moore-McNeil, and Ciezki — to call it out.
“I think that they can recognize when some of their teammates are not interested, maybe, in being at practice. For it to be an outlier, no. I’m not saying it’s consistent, but I’m not saying that we haven’t seen this by some of our players that come in and (give) low energy, and that bothers me,” Moren said. “There were a lot of things that happened yesterday during that (practice) that was disappointing. And it carried over into tonight.”
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