Inside Indiana Basketball's Late-Season Collapse: 'I Don't Have the Answers'

CHICAGO — Two minutes after he’d pulled his jersey over his face, clenched the polyester between his teeth and took a seat for the final time on Indiana basketball’s bench, Lamar Wilkerson decided he’d seen enough.

Wilkerson bowed his head and covered his face with a white Gatorade towel. Only an inbounds pass separated the Hoosiers from an inevitable death in a likely do-or-die game. Wilkerson couldn’t watch. His fingers gripped the towel around his eyes, temples and cheek.

The clock started, the buzzer sounded, the game ended.

Eventually, Wilkerson rose to his feet and draped the towel over his hair while plodding through the handshake line and making the long, painful walk back to Indiana’s locker room. After Wednesday night’s 74-61 loss to Northwestern at the United Center in the Big Ten Tournament, it may have been his last.

This wasn’t supposed to happen. Not this soon, anyways. Not in the Big Ten Tournament opener, not to Northwestern again and not before Selection Sunday. Wilkerson’s final farewell — and the Hoosiers’ last game — long figured to be in the NCAA Tournament.

No more.

Improbable as it may be, Indiana still has a chance to play in March Madness, though it needs a Selection Sunday miracle. But the raw emotion of it all — Wilkerson’s towel, the tears in senior guard Conor Enright’s eyes, the distraught stare from senior forward Tucker DeVries — carried an underlying sense of finality.

The end of the road, for all intents and purposes, seems to have arrived. March is made for fairytales. Indiana penned a horror story. And the Hoosiers don’t know how, or why, their Hollywood ending never came.

After an 18-point victory over Oregon on Feb. 9, Indiana had won five of its past six games, turning the page on a four-game losing skid in mid-January that appeared more an outlier than an indictment on coach Darian DeVries’ team.

But the Hoosiers only won one more game the rest of the way. They lost six of their final seven games entering Selection Sunday, and five of their defeats were by double digits. Two were by 20-plus points.

Indiana, once a strong bet to make the NCAA Tournament, now finds itself expected to be on the outside looking in for the third consecutive season — and forced to dig deep for answers as to how a promising campaign flipped on its head so suddenly.

“I don’t know. It’s tough. I’m not a coach yet,” Enright said, cracking a smile with his eyes red and teary. “So, I don’t know. I don’t know if they do either. I don’t have the answers.”

He’s not alone. Junior guard Nick Dorn sat at his locker and, for 10 seconds, stared straight ahead and appeared lost in thought. Dorn racked his mind, perhaps replaying blowout losses to Illinois and Purdue, lopsided defeats to Michigan State and Ohio State and a pair of missed opportunities against Northwestern.

“Um …. I don’t even know,” Dorn said. “It’s a tough spot to be in. I thought we had a great connection, great team. Sometimes, the shots just don’t fall.”

Senior forward Reed Bailey had a similar process. He paused, pondered, reflected. Then, he spoke.

“I'm not sure,” Bailey said. “That's just kind of basketball. You roll with the punches. You go game to game, day to day, practice to practice. And sometimes it just doesn't work out in your favor. I think we put the work in in practice.

“I think maybe there were some things missing that I don't know what they might be. But, yeah, it's tough.”

The Hoosiers played stiff competition at times during their rough patch — three of their losses were to teams ranked in the top 20 — but they also squandered two chances against Northwestern, which entered the Big Ten Tournament as the No. 15 seed.

But even then, the answer isn’t clear to junior guard Jasai Miles.

“I mean, it's hard to say,” Miles said. “Every game in the Big Ten is a tough game. You have a tough opponent, you're playing against great coaches, they scout well. So, not every one goes your night. I feel like we let a few slip from us that we definitely should have had, but that's what it is in a competitive league like this. You just got to be ready to play every night.”

And the more Indiana’s struggles compounded, the harder they became to stop.

Senior forward Sam Alexis won a national championship last season at Florida, which didn’t lose a game from March onward. The Gators won 18 of their last 19 games en route to the title.

Alexis was along for the ride while a wave of momentum carried Florida to great heights. He felt the opposite — the waves taking the Hoosiers back to shore — over the last month in Bloomington.

“As a team, you're trying to find your identity. I feel like when you go to a four-game losing streak, it's kind of hard to pick it back up,” Alexis said. “Last year, we had a lot of momentum when I was at Florida. That momentum we had going to the SEC Tournament, going to the NCAA Tournament, was good.

“I feel like we had no momentum coming into the Big Ten Tournament because we didn't really play our best basketball, and your best basketball is supposed to be played in March. So, I feel like we just didn't have enough momentum.”

Indiana owes its losses to issues on both ends of the floor.

The Hoosiers allowed opponents to average 75 points per game while shooting 48.8% from the field and 39.3% from 3-point range over the final seven games. Tucker DeVries said Indiana’s players had a lot of conversations in previous days about getting back to the basics, the habits, the foundation of the team’s defense, because the Hoosiers felt their attention to detail slipped.

But Northwestern’s offense still produced. The Wildcats shot 48.1% from the field and went 6 of 14 from distance while averaging 1.213 points per possession.

Indiana, meanwhile, had a difficult day offensively. The Hoosiers connected on 44.4% of their attempts from the floor and made just 6 of 17 triples. They averaged 1.07 points per possession and finished only 7 of 14 layups. Despite owning a significant size advantage over Northwestern, Indiana mustered 24 points in the paint to the Wildcats’ 34.

For the first time in their recent losing streak, the Hoosiers outrebounded their opponent, owning a 29-27 edge on the glass. Still, Indiana lost loose balls and struggled with Northwestern’s physicality and toughness, which sixth-year senior guard Tayton Conerway said was a trend in the team’s late-season spiral.

“I just think we got out-toughed and out-punked a couple games,” Conerway said. “I feel we could’ve threw the first punch, come out a little faster, probably rebound a little better.”

Perhaps most cruel to Indiana’s struggles is the fact it never quit. Enright said the last month has been the Hoosiers’ “most consistent” at practice. Their habits never waned, and Darian DeVries often touted his team’s willingness to show up for work each day with a hunger and desire to get better.

Indiana merely couldn’t translate its growth in practice to the game floor. The Hoosiers committed too many “self-inflictions,” Wilkerson said. Enright and Miles each noted Indiana failed to put a full 40 minutes together.

Enright cited missed box outs or defensive miscommunications. Miles pointed toward double-digit blown leads against Nebraska and Northwestern, a pair of games he feels would’ve put the Hoosiers in the tournament had they won.

Bailey admitted it’s “pretty surprising” better results didn’t follow Indiana while its practices improved. No matter, the Hoosiers are forced to languish in the sobering reality their steady work, at least in terms of earning an NCAA Tournament bid, likely didn’t deliver the reward they’d hoped.

“Sometimes, you work out. You try to get better. You go in the game. You shoot shots up. Sometimes, you go in the game, you don't make them. It goes with the same thing in practice,” Alexis said. “We practiced pretty well the whole month of March and February. It didn't translate. Sometimes it don't translate.

“All I can say is I'm proud of these boys. We try to attack practice every day. We come in the game with the right mindset. Sometimes the outcome is not what we wanted, so.”

Miles doesn’t prescribe to the notion Indiana needed more pieces. The players in the locker room, he said, were bought into each other. He felt the Hoosiers could’ve done anything and competed at a high level.

Bailey said the “sky was the limit” for Indiana. Wilkerson revealed earlier this season the Hoosiers, during preseason practices and film sessions, often recited the line “top 10” — they viewed themselves as a top 10 team.

Wednesday night, the sky came crashing down. Indiana knew the stakes, Dorn said, and knew what it had to do. The Hoosiers just fell short.

“Sucks,” Dorn deadpanned. “Sucks.”

Heavy emotions are attached to Indiana’s loss to Northwestern. NCAA Tournament implications aside, the Hoosiers’ six seniors may have played their final college game. They believed in Darian DeVries’ vision when he barely had a roster or coaching staff to support it. DeVries believed in them to help get his program off the ground.

In the middle of February, all signs pointed toward a happy ending. The scenes Wednesday night, with tears, hoarse voices and a deepened sense of disappointment, was anything but.

“We all came here wanting to lay the ground work for this program and the culture and really set the tone,” Tucker DeVries said. “But just down the stretch of the season, we weren't able to capitalize on some of the opportunities we had.

“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.”

Now, Indiana has a lengthy wait to learn its NCAA Tournament fate on Selection Sunday. The Hoosiers once controlled their destiny. Now, they may be forced to rest in the grave they dug for themselves in a costly, unexpected late-season downturn.

“You want to get it back, but you can’t stop time, can’t go back,” Dorn said. “So, you can’t really dwell on it too much.”