Tom Crean:

Christian Watford:

Daniel Moore:

Verdell Jones:

Jordan Hulls:

And yet there I was, getting all goosebumpy as John Laskowski nervously interviewed Rivers at halftime. Rivers talked about his son, Jeremiah, his (Doc’s) excitement on his son’s announcement that he was considering Indiana as a destination, and his desire to just be a parent during IU games. He even had the IU hat on. It was pretty cool. And it was probably the most noteworthy thing about IU’s relatively lackluster win over USC-Upstate Monday night.

This year’s Hoosiers present a weird paradox. They’re not last year’s team, as much as Devan Dumes might wish they were. They’re definitely better — you can see the heightened level of play almost immediately, from Rivers to Christian Watford (man, is it nice to have an athletic big man with touch in an IU uniform again) to Derek Elston to Maurice Creek, who might just become my favorite player on this year’s team.

But this year’s Hoosiers are not a good team. There is a long way to go from “better than 6-25″ to “good.” And so while last year a win like Monday night’s might have been cause for minor excitement — IU led by 20! IU scored 69 points! — this year, it feels harder to process. So, am I supposed to be excited that IU seems borderline competent again? Or should I be depressed by the fact that an 18-turnover game at home against USC-Upstate has me considering excitement? See what I mean?

It’s hard to know how to feel about these Hoosiers in the same way it’s hard to know whether or not any of them are good. It’s too early to know. Gauging college basketball teams early in the year is always a foolhardy proposition. Gauging a team that will play four freshmen and a transfer significant minutes is especially difficult. But here’s what I noticed so far:

• There’s a reason Christian Watford was such a big-time recruit. Imagine this guy in high school. He’s tall, athletic, he has touch around the rim, he can — gasp — dribble. I can just picture the rows of scouts drooling at his NBA workouts in (let’s hope) four years. But for all of Watford’s natural talent, bigger, stronger players are going to dominate him in the paint. He’s weak. He’ll get stronger; I hear IU has a pretty nice new weight room. In the meantime, though, tougher opponents are going to beat him up. You can already tell.

• I really like Maurice Creek. It helps that my roommate’s girlfriend goes by Mo, so we can call now start calling her Maurice Creek instead of Maurice Jones-Drew. It also helps that Creek has a pretty complete game, including a three-point stroke that’s just mechanical enough to reveal some serious coaching on the part of someone very dedicated along the line. Creek is like a way, way better version of Dumes: He doesn’t hesitate and he doesn’t rush. He knows what he’s supposed to do and he does it.

• Jeremiah Rivers is maybe a little shakier than you’d like. Rivers is a solid defender and a great passer, but other than that he’s a little more careless with the ball than a lock-down point guard is supposed to be. For a second there, I thought I was watching Daniel Moore.

• Hey, is that Daniel Moore? I didn’t recognize the long hair, man! Good to see you again!

• IU is still not in shape. This will come, but for now the Hoosiers are all about pushing the ball up the floor until the time comes to get back on defense. Transition defense is sloowwwww. It looked almost as bad as Kentucky, only IU doesn’t have an insane John Wall to bail them out of embarrassing home losses. (Or a third of the talent. But who’s counting.)

• Gus Johnson doesn’t yell for just anything. A few times I was hoping Johnson would let loose with some of his trademark hysteria, but not today. He was in full workmanlike Johnson mode. The man has range, people.

• Jordan Hulls could overtake Moore’s spot as IU’s most adorable, scrappy, lovable little white dude. It helps that he’s way better at basketball, too.

• Pritchard is still Pritchard, still sluggish around the rim on offense, still frustrating to watch in the pivot, still a surprisingly effective rebounder. He should be a good counterpoint to Watford’s streaky athleticism, but who knows, right?

• Tom Crean did not go to the dry cleaner this week. Come on, Tom. A gold and blue tie? Pulling from the back of the closet in the discarded Marquette collection already? For shame.

• But hey, at least he wore a tie. USC-Upstate’s coach rocked an open brown shirt with brown slacks and a brown coat. Tremendous look, really. He may have liked the way he looked; I did not.

• Oh, and one more thing: College hoops is back. Like, officially. Feels good, right?

It’s not as though I had given up on the season in any sort of meaningful way. Actually, I’d given up on the season, in the way most people use the phrase (i.e. forgetting about any sort of end-term success prematurely) well before the season started. Whatever illusions I had about surprising a few people are long gone. Whatever hopes I had for a mid-Big Ten finish vanished somewhere in the Lipscomb box score.

Still …

Saturday’s game showed something. It showed that despite all of IU’s truly serious flaws, despite their disadvantages in talent, and despite their inexperience and sometimes strange behavior … they can compete. They can be competitive. Even if it’s against Iowa — a team that might feed on the bottom of the Big Ten this year too — it shows that if IU defends well, rebounds, and does all the very fundamental things that coaches try to instill before anything else, they can put in a respectable performance.

Let’s not forget what happened here. Just days after losing to Lipscomb — Lipscomb! — IU went on the road as 14-point conference underdogs and had a chance to steal the game on the last play. I’ll take that. This year, please believe I’ll take that.

A STUDY IN BALANCE

For most of the season, IU has relied on … well, now that I write that, they haven’t really relied on anything, because they haven’t really won anything. But for the sake of comparison, the Hoosiers have been reliant on Tom Pritchard rebounding a bunch on the offensive end, and on Devan Dumes hitting threes and various other ill-advised shots and scrapping together some transition buckets, and so on. Maybe that’s not the best description of what they do, but it’s a rough approximation. It’s in the ballpark.

The point is that IU has not ever really been a balanced team. They rely on a select few players to do the bulk of the scoring and rebounding. And yesterday, in what I’d argue was their best performance of the season, this was decidedly not the case:

That is a balanced performance. Even Devan Dumes — who was erratic and wild and goofy all day — made a contribution by getting to the line. If he wasn’t so inefficient with the ball, he’d be even better.

Anyway, the point is that, whether wittingly or not, the Hoosiers were offensively and defensively balanced yesterday. For a team with nothing like a star on the team, that’s a welcome development.

BUT, ALAS, SOME MORE OF THE SAME

That positivity aside, the Hoosiers still did the same bad things they always do. They turned the ball over, though only 11 times, which is serious progress. They committed a fatal number of fouls — 25, to be exact. And they did all the weird little things they always do — running at the hoop, losing the ball in transition, throwing up wild shots, missing layups, and so on. Dumes was the most noticeable problem in these regards, but not the only one, and at the end of the game Daniel Moore sealed the deal with a really poor play. Under no circumstance should Moore find himself dribbling to the corner on that last play, and under no circumstance should he pass the ball with anything less than 100 percent certainty it would be received by a fellow Hoosier. And that, as they say, was that.

Anyway, that happens, right? This is the team they are. I’m willing to accept the positives from Saturday’s game, and ignore the negatives. It’s progress, at the very least. Like I said: I’ll take it.

The second half? As ugly as it was, and as much as I winced, and as openly as the ESPN studio clown mocked it — after the game, he said something like “They won’t be submitting that footage to the NCAA!” — IU undeniably played better than at any time this year. It was still ugly, sure. But there were signs of something underneath, too, a baseline level of competence, athleticism, and defensive ability that the Hoosiers had yet to showcase in their young, fitful season. It was nice to watch.

The point is that no matter how bad TCU is, or was supposed to be, IU has played its fair share of bad teams this year already (Chaminade, for one) and barely come out with a victory. Next to Cornell, and the first 20 minutes of Wake Forest, this was still IU’s most impressive performance to date.

I’m typing this from my apartment this morning as I rush out the door to an end-of-year corporate meeting that I didn’t know I had, so I won’t go too long with it, but a couple of things I noticed:

TP, OG: Tom Pritchard is a skilled big man. It took me a while to realize this — at first, I basically just wrote him off as a slightly-better version of Kyle Taber. He didn’t impress me. But he did last night. In a game against a team with no post presence whatsoever, Pritchard did what he was supposed to do: he had 15 points and 11 rebounds, and he controlled the interior for large stretches. Many of his buckets were the result of a) good positioning on the offensive glass or b) catching the ball in good spots and finishing easy baskets.

Pritchard may never be a star, and he might get eaten up by bigger, more athletic Big Ten forwards, but for now I’ll take him. He is a smart big man. He gets things done. That’s really all we can ask.

Verdell Jones, please come back: As much as I like Little Daniel Moore — “Little Daniel Moore” sounds like the protagonist in an Irish folk song — he has some key flaws. For one, his size; no amount of skill can overcome being smaller, and also less athletic, than D-1 college players. So Moore forces his dribble into places it shouldn’t go, and then loses it. He did this a couple different times last night. He is also a huge liability defensively, and he almost refuses to shoot, which reduces IU’s options on the offensive end. He’s a nice player, sure. But he’s not what he could be.

Which is why we need to get Verdell Jones back in the lineup ASAP. The two will complement each other nicely, I think, but asking Moore to carry the point guard load on his own is way too much to ask.

Finally, turnovers. Turnovers. Sigh. Turnovers. Even in the best IU games, turnovers are still an issue. IU had 19 turnovers last night. TCU, for what it’s worth, had 21. IU turned the ball over on 29.5 percent of its possessions. TCU turned it over on 32.8 percent. IU had, by all accounts, an incredibly sloppy night. To be honest, a better team — or maybe even a less turnover-prone TCU one — might have beaten IU. Maybe not. But with this game comfortably in our rearview, let’s take the one abiding lesson we know from our first foray in Indiana basketball:

If these turnovers continue, this season will not improve.

It’s just true. A team like IU gives up so much already — size, experience, speed, wile, athleticism, skill. All of the things that make up raw basketball talent, IU doesn’t have. So no one is expecting IU to win much in the Big Ten, and that’s fair. But to compete in the Big Ten, to compete on Saturday, IU has to stop turning the ball over. Has to. At the very least, that TO rate has to come down out of the stratosphere. The Hoosiers are too far behind in too many categories to just give the ball up to superior teams. We’re already playing with the short deck; we don’t need to forfeit any more cards.

Fortunately, Big Blue Nation likes to cough it up, too. So we’ll see how it goes.

After the Wake Forest drubbing Wednesday, I think we were all bracing for a slaughter this afternoon inside Lucas Oil Stadium. Gonzaga has size, experience, talent; they’re ranked No. 5 in the country and are serious contenders to make the Final Four.

IU was only down nine with 3:35 to go.

Now, this wasn’t so much IU playing their best game of the year, playing at a higher level than we’ve seen — it was Gonzaga only hitting 3-of-16 3-point attempts, the Bulldogs shooting 45.8 percent from the field and only 59.1 percent from the line. IU does deserve some credit for their defense, but in the first half Gonzaga seemed uncomfortable with the odd angles and sightlines at Lucas Oil. It was an off game for them on the offensive end.

But setting aside all that, IU was in this game until the last couple minutes. No matter how many times we turned the ball over, no matter how many times we got nothing going on offense and had to chuck something up in desperation as the shot clock ran down, we were in this game. Credit Tom Crean for getting these guys to scrap. Credit the team for not giving in and playing hard till the buzzer sounded. And credit the guys that went to the line today, as we hit a respectable 19-of-24. I’ll take it. Hitting 50 percent of our 3-pointers (6-of-12) in the second half helped out a ton, too.

(Aside: This is two games in a row now the general consensus was the other team — Wake, Gonzaga — played bad. Perhaps this is a trend. If IU can get teams like Penn State, Illinois, Northwestern, Minnesota or Iowa to play bad too, maybe we’ll sneak a couple wins out when Big Ten season rolls around.)

There were times in the second half when I wanted to believe. Just when Roth, or Dumes, or Taber drained a three and I thought “Well, maybe we can do it!” — Gonzaga came down and hit a quick three. Or Josh Heytvelt got position inside, dropped in a layup and got an and one. This is what good teams do. They finish. They respond. They overcome. They win.

THE BAD AND UGLY

I might as well just etch out my first sentence under bad and ugly for turnovers from here on out. It seemed like before the tip even came down, IU already had six turnovers. They had a ton early, and finished with 25 for the night. You can’t beat Gonzaga when you turn the ball over that much.

Without Verdell Jones to play at the point, Daniel Moore played a ridiculous 37 minutes and notched seven turnovers. With Moore not being a scoring threat, IU essentially played with four — and oftentimes less when Tijan Jobe or others were on the court — players with offensive prowess on the court. Taking nothing away from Moore who has been nothing but serviceable this year, but a freshman walk-on point guard should not be getting 37 minutes of play during a game. But this is the reality we face this year.

For as bad as the Zags shot, IU was even worse — shooting a woeful 14-of-46 from the field for 30.4 percent for the game. Adding in our seven made threes for the game, IU ended up with 21 made shots … four less than the total amount of turnovers they amassed.

When IU let the Bulldogs get out in transition in the second half, Matt Bouldin always seemed to be in the right place, as he got a few quick and easy buckets under the rim.

This was a lot closer than any of us expected. Chalk it up to one of the many “moral victories” and “learning experiences” we’ll get this season.

But, at the end of the day, it’s also another defeat.

Compounding the problem are the teams IU is playing. Things will become much clearer next Monday in Maui against Notre Dame — I am not looking forward to seeing who is going to guard Luke Harangody — but for now, what are we to make of IUPUI? Are they occasionally tourney-bound IUPUI? Or are they just bad? Should we be even more worried than we already are? I have no answers. Merely questions.

This was the case after the first game, too. Instead let’s just recap what we saw.

DEFENSE. REBOUNDING. OY VEY.

Again, I can’t emphasize this enough, especially to myself, because sometimes I get a little shortsighted: It’s early. Very much so. I remember last year when the team we all thought was going to the Final Four looked like they couldn’t play a lick of defense, and I was sort of freaked out. Then they got it together, and they were fine. (And then, well, you know what happened next.)

But if there are two things that have been utterly consistent — and utterly frightening — from tonight’s game and Saturday’s, it’s that this time does not rebound, and does not really defend. At all.

Part of it they can’t help. Tom Pritchard does his share, and Kyle Taber is never really out of position, but there’s just no size there. Even at the guard position, IU is incredibly small, and so there aren’t really any athletic guards that can crash the boards and help compensate for the overwhelmed front court. IU is going to be overmatched all over the place this year, and those mismatches will likely manifest themselves most blatantly when the ball clangs high off the rim.

That said, there is still room for improvement here. Box-outs can get better. Guards can use long rebounds to get out on the break. With a little tweak here and a little tweak there, things won’t be so cringe-inducing, especially on the defensive end.

Defensively, it’s much the same story. There are times when IU flashes some defensive chops, but most of the time I feel hostage to the other team’s whims. For example: In the first half, IUPUI seemed content to settle on outside shots, and they made almost none of them, including a stretch toward the end of the half when they missed something like 11 straight jumpers. They shot 25.8 percent in the first half, and IU took a lead into the break.

Then, in the second, half, IUPUI realized they could get layups at will, and so they took them. And took them. And took them. And they shot 60 percent in the second half, and they rushed back into the game, and IU had to fight them off at the last second. All because of the Hoosiers’ limitations — their defensive porousness on the perimeter, their inability to challenge shots at the rim. I don’t know whether these things are systemic, or whether they’re correctable. I just know that Luke Harangody and Kyle McAlarney might combine for 80 points on Monday. I fear for this outcome.

THE “CHIN-UP, SPORT!” PORTION OF THE PROCEEDINGS

I don’t want to be too negative, though. So let’s talk about things that weren’t actually all that bad:

Matt Roth can shoot. It’s nice to have a really, really good shooter on your team. No matter what else happens, at least there’s always the faint glimmer of hope that he could get hot and keep you in a game from time to time.

Daniel Moore is like Errek Suhr, but way better. Daniel Moore, what with being diminutive and white and scrappy and so on, is already drawing comparisons to everyone’s favorite scrappy, diminutive white guy of recent vintage, Errek Suhr. Problem is, those comparisons don’t do Moore justice. Suhr was essentially a short guy with a good long range shot and a tough nose on defense. Moore is a legitimate ball handler. He sees the entire court well, can make needle-point passes from the key or on the break, and just generally has more confidence on the ball than Suhr ever did. Suhr was always jittery. He reminded me of a Chihuaha. He would take three high dribbles and then get rid of the ball, quickly, before anyone could get to him. Moore actually seems interested in handling it, and doing some semi-stylish things in the process. I like Daniel Moore. He’s not exactly going to carry IU to a Big Ten title, but for a walk-on, IU could do a whole lot worse.

Plus, his face gear is pretty awesome.

Tijan Jobe. You think I’m being sarcastic, but stay with me for a — haha. Just kidding again. There’s nothing optimistic about Tijan Jobe, except that for three minutes a game, he looks more baffled on a basketball court than anyone I’ve ever seen, and this entertains me.

Tom Pritchard deserves more time. I was a little too harsh on Tom Pritchard in the first TMA. I guess I was just disappointed — I was hoping for some more athleticism, some more strength, that sort of thing. But those aren’t the only qualities that make a good big man, and a guy like Pritchard can get by on being in good position under the block, finishing consistently around the hoop, and being crafty in mismatches. Again, like Moore, he’s a limited sort of guy … but he’s all we’ve got, and it could be a lot worse, I think.

In fact, that’s the motto for the first two games: I have no idea what’s going on, but it could be a lot worse. Don’t believe me? Wait until Monday.

IU struggled immensely with turnovers and rebounds in their first bout of the season against Northwestern State. Tonight against the Jaguars, there was great improvement. The Hoosiers committed 13 turnovers — five of those came from Nick Williams — and snatched 32 board to IUPUI’s 29.

Daniel Moore asserted himself as the floor leader again tonight. The kid has confidence, handles the ball well and looks incredibly comfortable out there. And IU as a whole has proven to be a great passing team so far. For the night, they tallied 17 assists in a low-scoring affair.

Matt Roth had a coming out of sorts this evening, and displayed some of that range we heard so much about. (Dude was popping threes from way beyond the arc.) He tallied 12 points on 4-of-8 shooting from 3-point land.

Tom Pritchard put up a pretty beastly performance. Sure, he missed a bunny or two early on, but Pritchard is fast proving he’s a threat for a double-double every night, as he scored 19 and grabbed 10 boards for the game.

Also, we won. So that was nice.

The Bad:

Devan Dumes went cold tonight, going 3-of-12 from the floor and finishing with 10 points. What happens when Pritchard gets in foul trouble? Where do we turn then?

Verdell Jones twisted an ankle early in the second half, but was able to walk to the bench under his own control. Hopefully it doesn’t keep him out for Maui; We need all the bodies we can get. Best of luck on a speedy recovery, Mr. Jones.

The Ugly:

Our second half defense was awful. At times, it looked like IUPUI was just doing a layup line drill. I shudder to think how quickly things could have gotten out of hand if this was a Big Ten game, or Notre Dame, or Gonzaga.

And going along with that: let’s all remember we barely scraped by a Summit League team that is young and in the midst of a rebuild.

Lastly, I’m watching this North Carolina-Kentucky game right now and um, North Carolina would absolutely murder us. (We’d have our hands very full with Kentucky, too.)

The Jaguars (1-2) had a chance to win just their second game in program history against a Big Ten opponent. However, an ill-advised 3-point attempt by Alex Young and two free throws by walk-on Daniel Moore sealed the win for the Hoosiers (2-0).

“We had to find a way to win the game, and the guys were listening and found a way to do that,” IU coach Tom Crean said. “Any win is just a monstrous achievement for us right now.”

Tom Pritchard followed up his stellar debut with 19 points and 10 rebounds. Fellow freshman Matt Roth hit four 3-pointers and finished with 12 points.

IU led 31-20 at halftime, but the Jaguars opened the second half on a 18-7 run to tie the game at 38-38. Kyle Taber’s three with 13:26 remaining gave IU a 43-40 lead and the Hoosiers never trailed the rest of the way.

Alex Young and John Ashworth scored 15 points each for IUPUI.

• Box score
• Postgame press conference video
• Tom Crean press conference audio
• Players press conference audio

I’ll admit it: After about five minutes last night, I had to admit something to myself. I didn’t know who was who. It’s sad, I know, but I doubt that I’m alone here, and I hope it’s not too bold of me to admit it. It took me a second to figure out that Verdell Jones was No. 12, that that wasn’t Devan Dumes, that Dumes was the off-guard wearing No. 33, and who is that little dude with the Rip Hamilton facemask on? That’s not Finkelmeier, is it? And oh my God is that Tijan Jobe?! It took me a second to figure it all out, and it required me whipping out the laptop and keeping the roster handy. I’m not afraid to admit it.

Because of that, a lot of stuff blurred together, but plenty stuck out, too. Off we go, then:

THINGS TO BE SLIGHTLY, CAUTIOUSLY OPTIMISTIC ABOUT:

Effort: This is going to be a theme all season, so let’s just get it out of the way early. This team is going to be very likable. They are going to play hard. They are going to have good attitudes. All of that. Even when they’re not playing with a good attitude it will seem that way, because you can’t have worse attitudes than last year’s team, and as long as Matt Roth doesn’t smoke a crack pipe at midcourt and punch a cheerleader in the face, pretty much anything will seem like an improvement. So after every game, the chorus will be the same: These guys sure play hard! Man, they sure seem to care! Bless their little hearts, huh? This is going to get incredibly annoying. But last night? It was true. They did play hard. And they did seem to actually care. Credit where it’s due, both to the team and to Tom Crean for getting them to buy in. The best basketball coaches are salesmen, and Tom Crean could sell me a ticket to Kelvin Sampson: The Broadway Musical. He’s done the same sales job on his team. Effort will not be a problem this year, at least not anytime soon.

Devan Dumes: When I hear Northwestern State, I immediately think “last-second shot over Iowa in the NCAA Tournament,” and then I get a big smile on my face. But after I think of that, I (perhaps wrongly) think of the stereotype of a mid-Major — scrappy, unathletic, hard-nosed, heavily reliant on three pointers. Northwestern State wasn’t really like that at all. They were just sort of bad, especially on defense, where they were genuinely awful in the full court press. So I don’t want to get too excited about Devan Dumes’ night. But it is encouraging, at the very least, to know that the team contains some semblance of offensive talent that can score when allowed to do so. Dumes’ night was like that — impressive, but not overly so. Just solid. But I’ll take solid if it puts the occasional point on the board.

Verdell Jones: I might actually be more excited about Jones than I am about Dumes. For whatever reason, I really like Jones’ game — he’s lanky, deliberate, he sort of glides around. His arms are long enough to make him play bigger than his listed size. Having that kind of athletic ability at the point is a real luxury … even if Verdell has a lot of things to figure out about the position. On a team with minimal size, um, everywhere, Jones is a boost. (He also had kind of a crazy line last night: 18 points, five assists, three blocks, three steals, three turnovers, 10-13 from the free-throw line. That’s like a mini-Josh Smith-on-the-Hawks line. I love it.)

Daniel Moore: It took about five minutes last night before the the friends I watched the game with were already calling him the second coming of Errek Suhr. Fortunately — and no disrespect to Suhr — but I think it’s clear Moore is a much, much better player. I’m sure I missed something, but I don’t know if I saw Moore make a truly bad decision all night. Despite his size deficit, he gets around people in the open floor. He can make open shots, and he’s a great passer. So maybe he’s not a point guard in the Big Ten, but you can do much, much worse coming off the bench than Moore. That’s a great walk-on right there.

Tijan Jobe: Haha. Just kidding. Nothing to be optimistic about here.

THINGS THAT ARE BASICALLY AN UNMITIGATED DISASTER:

The Frontcourt: Speaking of Tijan Jobe, oh boy. The frontcourt. Where to start?

I don’t want to be too harsh, because Kyle Taber seems like a pretty cool dude. Relaxed guy. The kind of kid you’re hoping is your roommate when you move to school — plays video games, probably, not too rowdy, doesn’t do hard drugs in plain sight. (Everyone knows that kid freshman year. He is to be avoided; he won’t last the first semester.) So I think I like Kyle Taber as a person. But as a basketball player, as the captain of this team? Eesh.

Last year, Taber made a living off of one thing: playing opposite D.J. White. White would shoot it, and defenders would crash to him while Taber snuck in, grabbed a rebound, and either tipped it back in or passed to a guard and restarted the offense. He was perfect for that. But when Taber is the supposed to be your “best” big man, well, you’re going to get killed on the interior all season. Just murdered. And it already started last night.

For example: Northwestern State had 27 — 27! — offensive rebounds. Eight Northwestern players had at least two offensive rebounds each. Northwestern State had eight blocks, which doesn’t seem like that many, actually. I would have thought, oh, 30 or so? That’s how it felt, anyway.

As for the non-Taber members of the frontcourt: Tom Pritchard is like Kyle Taber, except left-handed. He might actually be a bit more talented, thank God, but he’s certainly not more athletic, or bigger; he just seems to know how to get the most of his limitations. And Tijan Jobe. Oh, Tijan. Tijan Tijan Tijan. God bless him. He looks incredibly interested in playing hard basketball, in rebounding, that sort of thing. That’s probably the nicest thing that can be said about his basketball ability right now.

THINGS WE KNOW NOTHING ABOUT:

Pretty much everything else. But there’s IUPUI Tuesday night, and so goes the season. Another game, another batch of info to learn. And then? The Road to the Final Four. We’re going all the way! 1-0! WOOOO!

This could be a long season.

The Good:

We won. By all accounts, we’re not going to be able to soak in victory a lot this season, so enjoy this one. And heck, I’d venture as far to say we looked pretty good in that second half. It was but Northwestern State, but a win is a win is a win.

Daniel Moore, though undersized, handled the ball with poise, made good decisions and played with great confidence. It’s yet to be told whether he’ll play as well against better talent, but he’s a solid option when Verdell Jones is on the bench or playing one of the off-guard positions on the floor.

Early on here, it’s apparent Devan Dumes is going to be our scorer. He chipped in 21 points on 6-of-10 shooting and hit 4-of-8 from beyond the arc.

IU’s defense played well, forcing 30 turnovers on the night.

The Bad:

IU’s free throw shooting was a poor 28-of-41. For a team that isn’t going to be able to coast past teams on their talent alone, the Hoosiers absolutely need to improve in this area if they want to have a fighting chance once Big Ten season rolls around.

The Ugly: 

It got sloppy at points. This is to be expected with a young team that is not used to playing together. But 23 turnovers for the game isn’t going to cut it night in and night out.

New to ITH? Learn how to register and join the discussion.