The Big Ten announced the All-Conference teams on Monday evening and as expected, both the media and coaches have selected D.J. White as the Player of the Year.

“It is a tremendous honor to be named the best player in a league that has so many great players in it. I want to thank my teammates, coaches and family for helping me obtain this personal goal. We still have a number of team goals left and we are looking forward to the Big Ten Tournament this weekend,” White said in a statement released by IU Media Relations.

Joining White on the first team All-Big Ten for the media: Eric Gordon, Jamar Butler, Robbie Hummel and Brian Butch. On the coaches side of things, the first team was White, Gordon, Hummel, Butch and Drew Neitzel.

Gordon was also named Freshman of the Year by both the media and coaches.

“I really want to thank my coaches and teammates, ” Gordon said. “This is an honor to be considered the best freshman in the league, especially when so many freshmen in the Big Ten are having great seasons.”

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Courtesy of the Big Ten Network:

Judging by the comments in our game thread last night, this was not a game most of you were stressing. That makes sense: It’s a late-season Big Ten game against Minnesota, the conference is now fully out of reach, and it comes after a lackadaisical 30 point drubbing at the hands of Michigan State. Not to mention the Coaching Situation of Which We Do Not Speak.

Moreover, those of us watching at home got to feel the pangs of senior night, but it’s not like this is the last time we get to see D.J. White suit up. There’s Penn State on Saturday, then the Big Ten Tournament, then the NCAA’s, then, if you really want to get devoted, you can become a fan of whatever NBA team takes White in the late first round. (And Eric Gordon in the lottery.) So no matter which way you slice the thing, last night’s game was a little boring. It was emotional without being heartbreaking, important without being dire, and interesting without being enthralling. It was IU-Minnesota on
March 5. Apathy ruled the day.

– Of course, it didn’t help that the Hoosiers were so sluggish for the first 30 minutes of the game. If we were nonplussed, what were they? D.J.’s three aside – at least he got that under his belt as a Hoosier – was there a single exciting moment in the first half?

Part of that is the situation: March 5 vs. Minnesota. But part of that seems worrisome. Since Dan Dakich took over as head coach, he’s done the following:

• Barely beaten then-0-13 Northwestern in a defensively horrid performance.
• Barely beaten a bubble-scrounging Ohio State team at home; again, not a great defensive performance.
• Gotten absolutely blasted out of the gym against one-time offensive force of nature (1.5 PPP!) Michigan State.
• Played sluggish, ugly basketball at home against the 8-8 Minnesota Gophers and Tubby “How long do I have to be mediocre before people stop calling me great?” Smith.

In each of the above games, the defense regressed while the offense has improved. If I remember correctly, Dakich claimed at the beginning of his tenure that he planned to keep the offense in place, but that he would tinker with the defense. Maybe four games is too small a sample size to judge, but note to Senor Dakich: STOP TINKERING.

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This is weird. Isn’t it? Isn’t it strange to be in this position right now? To gather, as I did last night, with friends at a bar, to celebrate another game with a Fat Tire and a sandwich, and to know all along that no matter what happens, your team’s coach is going down? He can beat your most hated rival (who just so happens to be the Big Ten’s top team) and still, against his will, it will be the last win of his tenure.

That’s two such wins now. The first was Saturday against Michigan State, a dominating performance that showed a resilient team rallying around their coach. The second was last night. Was it me, or did the focus seem to shift? Maybe it was because I was in a bar and couldn’t make out the commentary very well, but did last night’s audience — swept up in an important rivalry atmosphere — seem to forget about the sanctions for 40 minutes? I know I did.

It will be jarring to lose Sampson on Friday, but at this point, I’m not sure his presence is needed on the sidelines anymore. Stay with me here. It’s hard to complain about distractions after two very solid wins, but Sampson’s saga is a distraction. His assistants have been coaching this team all year; no doubt IU’s players feel just as comfortable with each of them as they do with Sampson. (Perhaps moreso, given the player-assistant-as-friends dynamic a lot of teams have.) It will be a difficult adjustment, seeing Dan Dakich running up and down the sidelines, but if the Hoosiers showed anything last night, it was a level of maturity and self-definition that gives me confidence in the coming games.

But that confidence doesn’t mean part of me won’t miss Sampson. He’s only been here for two years, yes, and even if this eulogy is premature (we still think Sampson’s going to be suspended Friday rather than fired), it will be a different place without him. He’s a frustrating coach, but if the past two years have taught us anything about his style it’s that his teams improve. They get better. They can make you miserable in November and December and even January, but come February and March they coalesce. They play hard together. They defend. And they’re fun to watch.

It’s a shame we can’t have a third year, but it’s a self-inflicted shame. And we know what we have to do. The dog might be cute. You might love the dog. But if the dog can’t control his bite, you put him down. It sucks, and it’s sad, but it’s best for everybody.

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The point of The Morning After is to glean and analyze, thus building a store of knowledge from which to draw when it’s time to figure how well we can expect this team to perform late in the season. Early in the season, however, this is an extremely difficult to do. After all, we can only learn so much from a 50-point win over Longwood; taken as a whole the game really doesn’t teach us much about how well IU will perform against teams that possess similar athletic ability, which is much of Division 1. Still, I’m firmly of the mind that few of the more finite details are unimportant, and so we trudge on. Let’s see what we’ve learned:

– Early in the game, it was evident that Kelvin Sampson not only gave Eric Gordon the green light — Sampson went ahead and told everyone on the team not to be bashful, which made for an entertaining opening five minutes. Gordon got his fair diet of shots, and was never hesitant. Neither was Armon Bassett. Those shots came early in the shot clock, from a variety of distances, thanks not only to Longwood’s inept defense but to a seemingly conscious choice by IU. This might foretell a change in strategy from Sampson — the coach is notorious for his plodding, defensive Oklahoma teams — but for now we can still safely consider it an aberration.

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I’ve yet to catch an IU game this year — that all changes Friday when DirecTV comes over, hopefully — but by all accounts Lance Stemler had a rough go of it Monday. He was out of position; he looked lost; he didn’t do much of anything right. So, in turn, the boo birds started chirping their sweet song at Assembly Hall. This then raises the question: is it OK to boo him? And futhermore, is it OK to boo any Hoosier basketball player?

I think there’s a few avenues to explore here. We don’t necessarily boo Lance because of how he played Monday. (Well, OK, maybe we do.) But really, we boo him based off what we know he can be — off of past performances. We saw him hit threes with consistency last year, grab key rebounds and display the girt and intangibles important to any team for success. But after his concussion — and add to that the fact he was playing injured for most of the season, unannounced, mind you — that all got lost somewhere in the fray. (Although, he did have a solid NCAA tournament run.) So when we see him out there as a starter and a captain, we expect more.

It’s the same thing with Sean Kline. He came in to IU as a highly-touted in-state recruit. But he never quite panned out and was unmercifully booed almost every step of the way his last year or two inside Assembly Hall. Did he deserve it? Maybe, maybe not. But we gave it to him, because we thought somewhere deep inside of him, there was a better player in there and we so desperately wanted it to come out. In the case of a guy like Ben Allen, there was a smattering of boos here and there last year. (I think, at least.) He never got the assault Kline got — or Stemler is perhaps currently getting — because there was always this hope with him that he was going to get better. His career line graph exists as an opposite to Kline’s and Stemler’s, it was trending upwards. Hey look: he’s trying to be a post player now! If he can just harness that size a bit, this could work out. We kept waiting … it never happened. But see, there was never this expectation with Allen, because he came here as a huge 3-point shooter. He didn’t come to IU as a post project. Think about it: would we ever boo Adam Ahlfeld? Of course not. We don’t expect brilliance from him. We expect him to cheer a lot and chuck up threes at the end of blowouts. We love that about him.

So, in the end, are we justified in our booing of Stemler? I’d lean more towards yes than no. But it’s not because we hate him or want to see him fail. It’s because we know he can succeed. We want him to succeed.

Note: In case you don’t dig into the comments, I was just trying to explain why people boo here and why — as paying fans — they have the right to do so. Probably shouldn’t have used “we” so egregiously. That’s what is probably throwing people off here. I’d certainly never advocate kicking a guy — especially an IU player — while he’s down. That being said: I can see both sides of the argument.