Mike Woodson must bring modern basketball to Indiana, or Hoosiers will be old news.

MINNEAPOLIS – Here endeth the lesson.

IU’s season concluded with emphasis Friday, the Hoosiers walking off the Target Center floor following a 93-66 defeat to Nebraska that neatly laid all the reasons this team fell so short of even its most basic expectations. The Cornhuskers, the Big Ten’s anti-Indiana in virtually every conceivable way, made it three wins in as many tries in this series this season, in all the same ways they’d won the first two.

The way they space the floor. The emphasis their offense places on the 3-point line. The remarkable efficiency and the virtually uncontrollable scoring bursts.

Doyel: Mike Woodson quit on his team in final game. And he's supposed to fix this?

No more: Indiana will decline NIT invite, turn attention to transfer portal.

Modern basketball at its most extreme, pushed all the way to one wall of the spectrum. Nebraska hit an eye-watering 12 3-pointers in the first half, all the fluid, free-flowing offense that followed a product of their use of every practical inch of the floor available to them. It has been a season to remember in Lincoln, when the promise of Fred Hoiberg’s tenure finally turned into reality.

Nebraska (23-9) this winter has come to resemble some of Hoiberg’s best, most hyper-efficient Iowa State teams. This was what the Cornhuskers dreamed he could build for them, just as he once had his alma mater.

Indiana’s alumnus coach will hope for a similar turnaround now. The lessons of Friday’s humbling defeat — IU’s third double-digit season-ending defeat in as many seasons under Woodson — must reverberate into what becomes a critically important offseason.

The Hoosiers (19-14) will not participate in the NIT if invited, a possibility only manifested by the five-game win streak that ended Friday night. There is, fair or not, little appeal left in an event long ago relegated as an afterthought behind the NCAA tournament and rendered even more irrelevant now by the modern recruiting calendar.

The spring portal window opens Monday. Woodson, who will be back for a fourth season in 2024-25, is expected to work with even greater NIL resources this spring than he did last. He will need to put them to excellent use.

He has a point guard, Xavier Johnson, to replace. He might also need to fill a Kel’el Ware-sized hole, the NBA draft beckoning for the one-time top-10 prospect. There will be other departures — Anthony Walker is out of eligibility, and portal outgoings must always be assumed.

Liam McNeeley, the sharpshooting five-star wing from Montverde (Fla.) Academy who looked for all the world like exactly the sort of talent Indiana needed to plug into its problems, has asked out of his letter of intent. The job facing Woodson and his staff is not a small one, and it begins immediately.

“We talk about the what-ifs, because you just don’t know based on the new system and the portal, who’s going to be on your team, who’s not,” Woodson said. “Who are we going to entertain once the portal opens up? This thing is going to come very quickly. We’ve got to be in a position to do our due diligence and our homework on these players.”

Woodson will need to start with his own roster. Those what-ifs he referenced are never far from becoming reality.

Ware wasn’t prepared to discuss his future in the immediate aftermath of Friday’s loss, saying simply, “The season just ended. I haven’t really made a decision on that.” His rising stock in a draft perceived more broadly to be weak at a number of positions might make his decision for him, once the time comes.

He will stand as further testament to Woodson’s ability to turn potential into production. In all likelihood, Ware will be Indiana’s third player drafted in the past two seasons, after the Hoosiers endured a five-year spell with just one player picked.

That’s the kind of sales pitch that lands the next Kel’el Ware in Bloomington. But Woodson must surround him with better complementary pieces or, in his own words, risk “sitting here this time next year not in the tournament.”

That means adding depth at point guard, to spell the load carried by Trey Galloway and Gabe Cupps. It means finding more bench production, after Woodson spent the balance of this season fighting in vain to coax consistent impact from his reserves.

And for all the world, it means adding certified, proven, established 3-point shooting — at volume — to his roster. Even if, as Woodson contends, basketball can still be played inside-out, that only works if what’s out spaces the floor adequately for what’s inside.

Otherwise, you end up with nights like this one.

Nebraska outscored IU by a combined 31 points across two regular-season meetings this year, and the way the Hoosiers embraced to their detriment the frantic pace of Friday’s start reflected that. They played like a team all too aware of their opponent’s offensive capacity, in a hurry to score points by any means necessary, knowing they’d need them later on.

But only one team was built for that pace, or the kind of basketball game it virtually always guarantees. Nebraska punched in front and stayed in front. Three Mackenzie Mgbako free throws cut the lead to 33-27 with 3:29 left in the first half.

Over the next 3 1/2 minutes, Nebraska tore off 17 unanswered points. Fifteen (15) of them were scored on 3-pointers.

“They just started knocking down 3s,” Johnson said. “We started losing them defensively, Tominaga started getting hot and call it a day from there.”

As 33-27 became 50-27, so passed the game and the season at once. The 2023-24 campaign died by a familiar means, a substantially more explosive offensive team rushing Indiana into mistakes, capitalizing on those mistakes and, the opportunity finally presented, sprinting away from a team that simply cannot shoot or score at that rate.

This was not a Nebraska-specific problem. In total, the Hoosiers lost eight games by at least 14 points, and five by at least 20.

Friday’s margin of defeat wasn’t even the worst of the season. That distinction belonged to a 28-point loss to Auburn in Atlanta in December, the Tigers that day making the same number of 3s (14) Nebraska sank over IU here in Minneapolis. Modern basketball defeating a team incapable of answering with it, one last time, a painful but handy reminder of what Woodson must prioritize this offseason.

“We’ve just got a lot of work to do this summer to get back and get our team back on top,” Woodson said.

That work starts right away. At best, the Hoosiers get the rest of this weekend to catch their breath, and players some time away to recharge. But for Woodson and his staff, ensuring the mistakes of 2024 are not repeated in 2025 means furious work in the coming days and weeks.

It starts where it should have for this program years before Woodson even returned to Bloomington: with shooting.

Follow IndyStar reporter Zach Osterman on Twitter: @ZachOsterman.

This article originally appeared on Indianapolis Star: Indiana must prioritize modern basketball, shooting in transfer portal