IU has pieces, little idea how they fit together, and rough road between now and Christmas

BLOOMINGTON – Between Mike Woodson’s challenge to his players to work harder for their minutes, and his sixth-year captain’s admission the Hoosiers’ poor practice habits are letting them down in games, Sunday night’s postgame news conference inside Simon Skjodt Assembly Hall might have fit a loss better than a win.

It’s important to emphasize it didn’t. Indiana did beat Army 72-64 and, to some extent anyway, they all count the same. If this is IU (2-0) suffering through growing pains and thickening its collective skin in the process, then Woodson can probably live with that.

But he also probably won’t fault anyone who’s at least a little alarmed by how hard his Hoosiers have made their work across these first two opponents, Florida Gulf Coast and Army. How stunted they’ve looked offensively. How often they’ve broken down at the other end of the floor. How much they combined their many shortcomings to flirt with a couple of disastrous defeats, Sunday in particular.

IU vs. Army player ratings: Ware impresses, Mgbako needs to 'play harder'

November conclusions are among college basketball’s most dangerous exports. We could fill a yearbook annually with things decided before Thanksgiving that look foolish by Selection Sunday.

It’s no stretch, though, to say this team, right now, does not look like it collectively recognizes what it’s good at, what it’s not and — perhaps most crucially — how to bridge the divide between those two most fundamental qualities.

“I'm going to be honest,” Xavier Johnson said postgame. “In practice we have our young guys, including myself — I'm not young, but including me, (Trey) Galloway, and just the whole team — we're not going as hard. I think our preparation led to that.”

It seems safe to assume “that” was Sunday night’s nail-biting near miss, to an Army (0-3) team ranked in the 330s nationally in KenPom. An Army team that hit 13 combined 3s across its first two games, double-digit losses to Marist and Division I transitionee Stonehill. An Army team disadvantaged next to Indiana in virtually every conceivable metric and still an Army team that led for only nine seconds fewer than it trailed Sunday, Indiana dancing with the kind of defeat a team all but cannot recover from in the course of just one season.

Woodson knows it.

He didn’t burn the paint off the press room walls Sunday night. If he gave his team the hair-dryer treatment at any point postgame, he kept that in his locker room. Indiana’s third-year coach was measured and thoughtful with his responses to questions about offense, effort, rotations and substitution patterns.

He was also honest.

Woodson name-checked several players — CJ Gunn, Mackenzie Mgbako, Kaleb Banks — as not presently measuring up well enough to see more of the floor.

“I want to see more from Mackenzie, more from Kaleb, more from CJ,” Woodson said. “I want to see more when they're in the game. If I don't feel like they're giving it to me, I've got to go somewhere else and get it.”

He said his team doesn’t trust itself enough offensively, leading to stagnant ugliness.

“We have to move it. We have to trust each other,” Woodson said. “We catch the ball, and the first thing we think about is putting the ball down on the floor, making a play for myself. This is a team game, a team sport. So we have to trust each other, and that's my job: to get them to trust.”

He bemoaned the bad defense that’s stifled the transition offense he needs his team to run, to mitigate its halfcourt shortcomings.

“The game is like this,” Woodson said. “If you get stops and you rebound the ball, you have an opportunity to get out and fast-break and make plays. If you get in passing lanes and you get easy steals where you can generate offense that way, it's a quick way to get out and play faster.

“Right now, we're doing none of those things. We're not getting stops. We're not getting the ball out and getting up the floor and playing faster.”

He talked about effort and heart in dealing with the screening actions that are leading to too much rotation, too many breakdowns and too many 3-pointers.

“We have to get better in pick-and-roll coverage and getting over the ball screen and guarding — taking on guarding your own guy,” Woodson said. “I thought last season we were good in that neighborhood, but right now we still have a ways to go.”

And, yes, Woodson recognizes the problems created by a massive discrepancy in 3-point shooting. Indiana has been outscored by a total of 42 points from behind the arc in its first two games.

“We haven’t,” he said, “shot the 3-ball very well.”

In short, he sees what’s wrong. Some of it is scheme. Some of it is effort. Some of it is execution. All of it is combining into a rather lethal brew for the Hoosiers, who will have their hands full Thursday night with Wright State before facing UConn in New York.

Sweeping generalizations after 80 minutes of basketball are, as previously discussed, dangerous. So many teams are not by March what they appear to be in November.

This one has prodigious talent. The individual tools available are as tantalizing as the inability right now for them to fit together is clear.

Woodson has a few things in his pocket. He has the beginnings of a bench, thanks to Gabe Cupps and Payton Sparks. He has a small lineup he knows he can turn to. He has two senior guards who will not wilt, a lottery pick finally blossoming in the middle in Kel’el Ware, and a sophomore in Malik Reneau who at times plays beyond his age.

That will have to be enough for now. Because the distance this team currently has to travel between where it is and where it needs to go to reach what it would consider an acceptable return this season is, to put it kindly, pronounced.

Follow IndyStar reporter Zach Osterman on Twitter: @ZachOsterman.

This article originally appeared on Indianapolis Star: Indiana basketball: Roster is talented, but disjointed to start season