When it matters, this IU basketball team shrinks from the moment. That's alarming.

Mike Woodson said postgame Friday he didn’t think CJ Gunn’s brief altercation with Max Klesmit, which involved Klesmit apparently wiping sweat onto Gunn before Gunn casually struck Klesmit in the face with his arm, warranted an ejection.

It feels important to lead with that, in the aftermath of Indiana’s 91-79 loss Friday night at No. 8 Wisconsin, in one of the more impressive backdoor covers the Big Ten should see this season.

Because while social media did what social media will do in the wake of Gunn’s ejection for a Flagrant 2 foul — IU’s third standard flagrant in its past four games — what made the moment so important to the meaning derived from Friday’s game was that it was not remotely the most worrying aspect of Indiana’s performance.

A 'disconnected' mess. 19 games into season, IU doesn't know what it is.

Indiana (12-7, 4-4) began this week needing to prove itself capable of rising to meet its toughest opposition, to start building an NCAA tournament resume it is rapidly running out of time to compile. Twice, when asked to prove their mettle, the Hoosiers managed only casual surrender, in a pair of games that suggest this team’s season will not last beyond spring break.

“I put it where it lies,” Woodson said of team leadership Friday. “It still starts with our seniors. We’ve got three of them. I didn’t think (Anthony) Walker was very good. (Trey Galloway) had a stretch where he just was horrendous, really cost us about 10 points. Those are things that are correctable that we’ve gotta clean up as we move forward, if we’re going to stay in the hunt.”

Losing by 21 on your home floor, to your arch rival, in a game when your sixth-year senior captain is whistled for one of those flagrant fouls and the reigning Big Ten player of the year is flexing on your floor and his team’s second-leading scorer on the night is mocking your crowd on his way to his bench … these are the sorts of moments that should prompt at least some measure of self-reflection. This is when what needs cleaning up should begin to get cleaned up.

Life isn’t Hollywood. There are so rarely singular moments when hard truths are confronted in darkened gyms and punctuated with unifying cries of togetherness that prompt a montage of remarkable turnarounds.

Success is achieved the hard way at this level of college basketball, and on the back of the past two results — let’s be fair, on the balance of a season now well past its halfway point — this team doesn’t look built for the hard way.

Yes, without a doubt, the recent spat of flagrant fouls is concerning. Gunn might have been trying to give as good as he got from Klesmit on Friday, but there’s a lack of discipline shown in these incidents that becomes a reputational trend if not arrested.

If the Klesmit-Gunn incident had been the worst of IU’s indiscipline in Madison, Mike Woodson might have been able to live with the frustrating flight home.

Not for the first time this season, Indiana spent too much of Friday night’s 40 minutes looking too soft to another team’s punches. Wisconsin (14-4, 6-1) runs seemed at times to count double — the points widened the gap on the scoreboard, but they also deepened a visible lack of individual or collective belief in road crimson.

Woodson said postgame the Hoosiers are “a new team … still trying to figure each other out.” Twitter flew into that quote, pointing out IU has had 19 games to get comfortable and missing the point. The issue with that assessment is not that a team shouldn’t need 19 games to find itself, it’s that a team has had six months, going back to the summer, to in Woodson’s words “figure each other out,” and it still hasn’t.

In the final reckoning, Indiana could be allowed to the casual observer to have earned itself some measure of credit Friday.

The Hoosiers fell behind by as many as 23 but didn’t stop fighting. They went on the road against the Big Ten leaders without Kel’el Ware, perhaps their most important two-way player, and still covered. They hit 6-of-14 3s and 17-of-21 free throws, and scored a staggering 1.61 points per possession in the second half.

But it’s easy to make free throws when the pressure’s off, and 3s go up easier when they’re cutting the deficit from 16 to 13. When it mattered Friday, Indiana — as it had done against Purdue, arguably against UConn and certainly against Auburn — shrank from the moment. That is deeply concerning.

If this team’s aim is no longer the NCAA tournament, then fair enough. If there’s some sort of public acknowledgement of the change in direction and expectation around this season, then the rubric against which this team is graded will change. These assessments will grow less harsh. The curve will ease.

That won’t happen, though. It can’t. And for a program like this one (whatever your opinion on IU’s blue-blood status), it shouldn’t.

Which leaves Woodson with a difficult job.

He has seniors from which he still has to beg leadership. He has an offensively limited group that lost by double figures Friday night despite its hands-down best offensive performance against a meaningful opponent this season. He has a team that seems to grow further apart and cast itself further adrift the tougher the task in front of it gets.

“Keep working,” Woodson said steadfastly postgame. “That’s all you can do, is keep working.”

Purdue should have been the kick in the teeth needed to sharpen Indiana for the rest of this season. But only if the Hoosiers were capable of becoming the kind of team they aspire to be.

Which raises, in the wake of Friday night’s loss, the most concerning possibility of all: Maybe they aren’t.

Follow IndyStar reporter Zach Osterman on Twitter: @ZachOsterman.

This article originally appeared on Indianapolis Star: Indiana basketball pushed around by Wisconsin, season spiraling