In the interest of staving off those existential demons, let’s get positive for a few paragraphs here, shall we? Cool. As there is no Shon Morris to take any rage out on this week, it’ll hopefully be a little easier.

(First, let’s do a musical interlude, something to help the mood:

WHOA OH OH. WHOA OH OH. Man, I’m ready now. Let’s do this.)

Ryan touched on much of “The Good” last night, but at least one of his points deserves to be hammered home: Verdell Jones is an improving basketball player. The freshman was set behind by an early season injury, but he seems fully recovered. What’s more, he seems to be learning. His direction of the offense (which at times against Ohio State’s matchup zone stretched the good-faith use of the term “offense”; standing overloading one side of the court doesn’t work if the overloading duo are standing right next to each other) was, as Ryan wrote, competent. His ability to get to the rim is a welcome sight. Jones isn’t a conventionally quick player. He glides, swoops to the lane, takes long jump stops before settling in to his mid-range jumper. He’s far from a perfect player — his defense is a long way away, among other things — but having someone who can both distribute the ball and command the team and also, you know, shoot the ball from time to time (cough Daniel Moore cough) is big.

What else? Well, fortunately for IU, last night’s loss could have been a lot narrower. I suppose that isn’t fortunate, since IU ended up losing anyway, but it should be noted that Ohio State shot the ball exceptionally well. Like, almost-off-the-charts well. Their effective field goal percentage (which accords an extra half percentage point for three point shots made) was 65.1 percent. Their season average is 51.1. And, though IU has had its woes in guarding the perimeter this season, they’re holding opponents to 52.7 percent eFG% on the season. What does all this mean? It means that while IU was probably worse than usual in defending the three, they played a team that was also very hot from the field, especially in that first half.

Anyway, for a little more statnerdness, below is a chart with Dean Oliver’s Four Factors; you’ll notice the eFG discrepancy immediately.

Ohio State misses a few of the shots and well, who knows? Actually, I know: IU still would have lost. But the loss wouldn’t have seemed so bad, and we would be talking about how the Hoosiers bounced back well from the Illinois loss, etc. See what I mean?

Let’s see, what else was good last night? Oh, yeah: Steve Lavin and Brent Musberger.

Because IU isn’t very good this year, it will likely be the rare Tuesday that I get to watch the Hoosiers play while the dulcet sounds of Brent Musberger ring in my head, but Brent, if you’re out there, just know that I love you. Your verbal flubs and occasional senior moments are totally fine with me. For whatever reason, your gravitas is like Tom Brokaw’s — you could fail miserably at your job and I’d still think you were awesome, just because your voice is so great. You and Brokaw were the televised soundtrack to my childhood. Keep trucking, Brenty.

And as for Steve …

Some people may get tired of Lavin’s schtick. Some people might get irritated when he says “pepper-pot,” or get confused at any of his one-off coined phrases that he invents and then discards like so much detritus. They’d have a perfectly reasonable preference. I could understand such a belief. But I do not share it. Rather, Lavin was the highlight of my night last night, the only guy that makes things interesting. And it’s not just the schtick, either — he’s a genuinely reasoned, well-thought-out dude, and he makes smart points both about the nuts and bolts of the game and about the larger situation, in this case, the ongoing rebuilding saga surrounding Our Indiana. I thought he and Brent killed it, and that was, as I’ve noted, a very good thing.

Lastly: We have to invent some sort of weekly award for Tom Crean. Maybe we can put it in the end of TMA, maybe not. But for a guy coaching dudes who are not only outmatched physically but who are routinely outsmarted and outplayed, he never — ever! I’ve been trying to catch him! — shows overt frustration. He only goes so far as the same level of frustration other coaches have with their players regardless of talent. He could be coaching the Harlem Globetrotters; his face gives nothing away. I can’t maintain the same, and I’m sitting at home on the couch with my laptop out. This man deserves the Nobel Prize. Or at least something we can cook up.

Anyway, that’s The Day In Indiana Positivity. Fun, right? Let’s see how long this one lasts.

I think we can chalk most of last night’s game up to bad shooting. Look at the numbers: The Hoosiers shot far below their season average effective field goal, putting up 43.4 percent. Their season total is 10 points higher than that, at 53.6 percent. The turnovers were about even with their season average and the points per possession weren’t wildly different — IU just shot poorly. Fortunately, the Hoosiers rebounded well on the offensive end and held off a weirdly inconsistent Buckeyes team.

It’s hard to get a good feeling for where the Buckeyes stand. In their first 12 minutes on the floor, they looked disinterested, sloppy, outwitted, and boring. In their next 20 or so minutes, up until and after the half, Ohio State looked focused, efficient, and driven. The real OSU probably falls somewhere between that mix, which isn’t likely to be good enough to get them in the NCAA tournament.

– I’m pretty sure I saw a comment — lots of comments, actually — in the postgame thread last night complaining about Eric Gordon. That’s partially justifiable: Gordon had a bad game last night. A really bad one. 17 points in 40 minutes is not exactly stellar, especially given the awful shooting and the seven turnovers. Gross.

I think it’s safe to say now that this is what Eric Gordon is. He’s flawed. He’s a good shooter prone to off nights without much of a mid-range game. He’s fantastic at getting to the basket but isn’t always under control when he gets there. He plays fast and loose and hard, but his ball handling is the weakest part of his game. He turns the ball over. A lot.

He also gets to the free throw line more frequently than anyone else in the conference and makes 86 percent of his shots while there. That, as it did last night, is perhaps his most important and valuable trait, one that sustains his game when everything else is broken. This is the player we recruited. This is the player we have. Complaining about it now is almost pointless.

– I love Steve Lavin and Brent Musberger, but they have a funny habit of taking the wrong side of every issue. Just last week, in their broadcast of IU’s win over Purdue, Musberger was openly lobbying to keep Kelvin Sampson around. He never really provided justification for his opinion on the matter — either he didn’t think Sampson cheated, or didn’t deserve the punishment for his crimes. Either way, it didn’t make a lick of sense.

Last night was no different. It was Lavin, this time, providing horrible advice to IU’s administration: Consider hiring Dan Dakich. It’s a comical notion. Dakich is a palatable, keep-everybody-happy interim coach that will likely do a fine job keeping the team intact over the next few weeks. Maybe he’ll even make a tournament run! But regardless of his success, the chances of him keeping this job are absolutely zero.

What was even funnier than Lavin’s suggestion was the circular way he went about justifying it. At Bowling Green, Dakich posted a 156-140 over ten years. That’s pretty middling, and usually, “middling” at a mid-major doesn’t earn one a top job in the country. You have to be Sean Miller good, or Mark Few good. But according to Lavin, Dakich “honed his craft” — whatever that means — and would be a good fit thanks to his Bob Knight ties. Also, Lavin compared Dakich to Joe Torre, which is laughable not only because Torre is probably a better manager of people than Dakich will ever be, but because managing in baseball is so much different than college basketball it’s not even worth a comparison. Baseball managers take the talent they’re given and manage it to the best of their abilities, and most studies point to the idea that managers have a relatively negligible, or at least statistically undetectable, impact on the game. Take Joe Torre: Torre is known as a Hall of Fame manager because he won four titles with the New York Yankees, but anyone that watches baseball intelligently realizes that the Yankees were the highest-paid, most-talented organization in baseball for almost all of Torre’s tenure.

Unlike Torre, after this year, Dakich’s talent reserves would be dry. He’d be responsible for recruiting his own talent, not having it handed down by a front office, and the thought that Dan Dakich is somehow the right coach for IU for the long-term future is just laughable. Even Dan Dakich knows this. So Steve Lavin, please stop saying otherwise. We love you too much to see you be wrong so often.

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.

– Part of my confidence in a post-Sampson team this year is, like I said, that improvement. If the coach has given us one present before he’s suspended/fired/never heard from again, it’s in progressing his team forward by leaps and bounds in the past two weeks. This is a team, remember, that barely squeaked out an away win at Illinois, a team that I had all but written off as a serious contender. That team had brutal flaws: couldn’t defend the perimeter, couldn’t play man-to-man, couldn’t find a decent four spot, couldn’t get decent point guard play. Are any of these problems anymore?

– Armon Bassett is playing as well as he’s ever played, not only in shooting the ball — if he keeps improving, he’s going to be an incredible shooter — but in the way he runs the offense. He still had too many turnovers (5), as did IU (23. Eesh.). But he was focused, efficient, made good decisions, got IU into their half-court sets quickly … he was what you need a point guard to be.

– Turns out IU can defend the perimeter: Purdue took 72 shots in a 72-possession game last night, and only happened to connect on 25 of them. What’s worse, they were 7-25 from three, and posted a 39.5 effective field goal percentage, the type of shooting night that will kill you regardless of the defense you’re facing. Still, call me optimistic, but given the way Purdue’s been shooting from three the past few games, IU deserves a lot of credit for challenging those perimeter shots both in the zone and in man-to-man defense.

– As for the four spot, Kyle Taber is, well, he’s Kyle Taber, but it turns out Kyle Taber is all we need at the four. Compared to Mike White and DeAndre Thomas, who are both incredible mistake- and foul-prone, Taber is a breath of fresh air. Where Thomas believes it’s important to get himself shots, Taber actually refuses to shoot the basketball unless he’s three feet from the hoop. Seeing as we have the country’s best big man — that’s right, D.J.’s better than Tyler Hansbrough — across from that four spot, all we really need is Kyle Taber. Now, if we could only find a spot for Adam Ahlfeld …

– The one overriding negative about IU’s performance last night was the turnovers. Those have to get cleaned up. Fortunately, IU was efficient in every other phase of the game. Check it out, courtesy of Statsheet:

That chart shows a team that outplayed Purdue in every offensive phase of the game. The only thing Purdue did demonstrably better than IU was score more field goals, but it happened to take them, oh, 30 more shots to make an extra five. In the meantime, IU was getting to the line and making 88 percent of their free throws. Perhaps my favorite stat is total possessions: The Hoosiers weren’t afraid to get up and down the floor last night, a major plus playing against a strong Purdue team that seems comfortable bruising under the basket.

– What little commentary I heard last night was from Steve Lavin, who was actively campaigning for D.J. White to receive player of the year honors. I think it’s official: Steve Lavin loves IU. Earlier in the season his hyperbolic love was directed toward Eric Gordon; now, it’s White. We have to ask the question (jokingly): Does Steve Lavin want the IU job? Would we want Steve Lavin? I can just imagine the press conferences — Lavin using every goofy catchphrase he’s come up with in broadcasting. “Well, you know, Armon Bassett’s just our energy guy out there, he’s our little pepper pot …”– Finally, in closing, a note to Purdue fans: If your social scene is so broke that you have to congregate in alcohol-less Mackey Arena to get your kicks for IU-Purdue, I’ve underestimated the lameness of your college experience. Please, please don’t do that again. Go get some beer in your system. Live a little.

Also, Scott Martin looks like he’s 14. That’s all.

Anyway, if we have to lose our coach, and say goodbye to the promise of his tenure, last night was a pretty damn good way of doing it. Pat Forde summed up how to feel pretty well this morning:

“We love your team. We hate your ethics. We’re confused as hell. We want to thank you for beating Purdue — and now we’d like you gone.”

Farewell, Kelvin.

The random assortment of observations that is this column starts … now:

– There were times I watched last night, and I felt like I was watching Memphis or North Carolina. In that, I mean that it was so clear one team was more talented than the other, that it became obvious that the more talented team didn’t need to do much strategically besides run down the floor and let their talent take over. The Michigan 1-3-1 zone was entirely ineffective against the half court, and the man-to-man was even worse. It was obvious: No matter what the Wolverines did, no matter what their players tried individually or as a group, they weren’t going to keep IU from scoring when it wanted to. As an IU fan, that was a tremendous feeling, and a totally alien one.

It also speaks, I think, to what we’ve been complaining about a little in the early stages of this season. Many of us have begged for more offensive structure. Many of us want to see Gordon running off screens all night. Whatever it is we want, Kelvin Sampson is clearly trying to strike a delicate balance between letting his talent do its walking, and letting his strategy rein it in. So far, it seems to be working.

– Poor John Beilein. Every missed three, every shanked layup, looks like it’s already taking years off the man’s life. At the very least, it’s robbing him of his few remaining hairs. It’s not his fault: This talent isn’t his, and with the exception of Manny Harris, Beilein has very little to work with in his first year. Surely he knew what he was getting into, so sympathy is probably wasted on him. Still, you can’t help but think he longs for the heady days of Kevin Pittsnogle and Mike Gansey, when the three pointers flowed like wine and the women flocked instinctively like the salmon of Capistrano.

— D.J. White was a monster last night, and is totally deserving of praise. That said, I’ll temper it a little bit, because within a few minutes it became clear as day that Michigan simply doesn’t have what any reasonable basketball fan would call a “post player” on their team. Sure, they have semi-tall guys. But those are merely that. Tall. They can’t score, defend, or rebound — or at least they didn’t last night — so D.J.’s big time performance is a little bit less impressive than it normally would have been.

All that said: D.J. was still a monster in almost every way. Bodes well for the immediate future, that does.

– I feel obligated to defend Jordan Crawford. Crawford caught a lot of hate in last night’s game thread from you Hoosier faithful, and it’s not hard to figure out why. Crawford didn’t shoot very well, didn’t take care of the ball, and even worse, chose to attack at all the wrong times. He was pressing, and he didn’t have a very good game. But it was one game. It’s important not to forget what we’ve seen from Crawford in past games, when he was a player that showed an uncanny knack for scoring the basketball in idiosyncratic ways. He remains a freshman, and will be prone to mistakes throughout the year; not only that, but his defense leaves a lot to be desired. But I think we know the alternative — Armon Bassett — is not exactly a defensive specialist himself, nor is he the most efficient court general either. So yes, Crawford had a bad game. But let’s not lose perspective about how good Crawford has been, or even more importantly, how good he can be.

– We learned a lot about Steve Lavin last night. Let’s count those things:

• He really, really, REALLY likes Eric Gordon. If Eric Gordon were an ice cream flavor, Steve Lavin would order him every time. Hey, I feel him. I would too.
• He is, apparently, an ass man. How do I know this? Throughout the game (but most specifically in a segment discussing DeAndre Thomas) he used the words “Fantastic Fannies.” I thought that was a clever little bit of alliteration, but little did I know he had an entire prepped segment discussing the college game’s truly “Powerful Posteriors.” Seriously! Also this: “The hips and girth are important. The gluteus maximus is underrated as a weapon.”
• He’s a baseball fan. Lavin called Gordon’s signature one-hand tomahawk dunk a “Tom Seaver by-the-blue fastball.” I get it, but I kind of don’t get it.
• He is a fan of Eastern cultures. He said DeAndre Thomas was “planting in the post like a sumo wrestler.” While visually accurate, I’m not sure how many sumo wrestlers plant in the post, let alone play basketball. Thomas might be the closest thing yet. (Disclaimer: Only kidding! I love Dre, and totally admire the amount of work he’s put in to get in shape this season.)
• His wife is an actress, but not only that, she just finished wrapping a music video with Ludacris. Rap videos are in a process of transition right now, transitioning (thankfully) from bootie-shaking cash tosses to gritty street realism. Still, the thought of Steve Lavin’s wife in a rap video — where women are rarely treated as such — is a totally odd thought.

All that aside, I’ll admit it: I love Steve Lavin. He’s thoughtful, articulate, intelligent, self-aware, and funny and, in my limited experience, a genuinely nice dude. The world needs more Steve Lavin, if you ask me, which you didn’t.

– Finally, Brandon McGee’s final shot was pretty silly, but the best thing about it wasn’t Sampson’s reaction (“Don’t do that!”) or the Michigan crowd’s (“Assholes! Assholes!”). No, it was Jamarcus Ellis trying to hide his smile in his jersey like a grade schooler trying not to laugh in class. We caught you, Jamarcus, but don’t worry: We were laughing too.

It was impossible not to laugh last night; that win was as good as they get. Here’s to plenty more of those in the Big Ten calender … and plenty more of Steve Lavin, too.

Lavin called the Michigan State/NC State blowout Wednesday night at the Breslin Center alongside Dave O’Brien. During the second half, he got sidetracked into talking about our boy, Eric Gordon. The result was the following:

How about Eric Gordon. In my book, Dave, right now the best freshman guard since Jason Kidd broke out of high school from St. Joseph’s in Oakland and played for the Cal Bears.

I think he’s the best freshman in this remarkable class. He’s got a shooting stroke as tight and efficient as J.J. Redick. We’re seeing his ability to get to the rim and just toy with defenders. His quickness, his smothering ball pressure, his poise and composure, the total skill set, I believe, the best guard in college basketball since Jason Kidd.

And I had the chance to coach some good ones, you know Baron Davis was very special, the third pick in the draft, but Gordon’s development is ahead of where Baron was as a freshman. He’s got the ability to beat you in so many ways. With his defense, in transition, he can three-ball you, he can post you up, get offensive boards down low, just a remarkable young player.

Hear that, O.J. and Derrick?