For one strange night, Indiana basketball earned the right to feel good about itself again

BLOOMINGTON – Losing streaks, Mike Woodson’s done.

Frustrated locker rooms. Teams searching for answers. Sleepless nights.

But the fire alarm was a new one.

Indiana’s path to breaking its four-game slide included a brief locker room break because the Assembly Hall fire alarms were going off during the second half of a 74-70 win Tuesday night against Wisconsin. Having worn the heavy burden of that losing streak — amid a season gone so awry — Woodson will surely have taken an unplanned timeout on the chin.

“This team, we’ve been down a little bit. Losing four games like we’ve lost, you’re searching as a coach, players are searching trying to figure each other out,” Woodson said. “Tonight was Indiana basketball at its best.”

Indiana (15-13, 7-10) basketball might still have some distance to travel back to its best. But Tuesday night at least delivered deserved catharsis for, as Woodson said, a coach and players searching for answers not forthcoming.

This has been the ugliest run of Woodson’s three-year tenure in Bloomington, without question. He’s had just one losing streak longer than this one — a five-game run in February of his first season — but never a slump so pronounced as the 5-10 15-game sample IU has weathered since Big Ten play resumed in January.

Wisconsin (18-10, 10-7) has struggled through a difficult February of its own, but Woodson won’t apologize for toughing out a win badly needed for morale and momentum, if nothing else.

“When you go through a stretch like that, I don't wish that on anyone. Nobody likes to lose. Me being who I am, I hate losing. But there is a lot that comes with that, man. You got to stay patient,” Woodson said. “That locker room is happy. It’s like we got that monkey off our back.”

No one made a bigger difference than Kel’el Ware.

On a floor full of college players, Ware played like a pro. He scored 20 points in the first half and 27 for the game, to go with 11 rebounds and five blocks. The sophomore 7-footer missed just one field goal attempt all night.

Wisconsin actually outscored IU in the paint Tuesday, but even a cursory reading of the box score would leave little doubt where the game was won, and who won it.

“This win means a lot,” said Ware, who sat out the Hoosiers’ loss at Wisconsin last month through injury. “It's not even just about me. That whole team has just been, as y'all seen, on a little downhill. I feel like tonight we finally got over the hump.”

For a time, the Hoosiers threatened to make light work of Tuesday’s game. Then, as they too often have this season, they made it hard again, letting Wisconsin methodically dismantle a 32-17 lead across the course of roughly 16 game minutes.

The alarm stoppage dropped neatly into the middle of that fray. Play initially did not stop despite audible sirens and an automatic evacuation message playing over the Assembly Hall loudspeakers.

Referees finally halted the game with 10:06 remaining in the second half, sending both teams to the locker room as arena personnel worked to evacuate fans. Wisconsin coach Greg Gard deadpanned postgame that the alarm acted as a “great timeout” for IU, but the Badgers actually took their first lead of the game just the other side of it.

For much of the last 10 minutes, the game pinballed back and forth, before Indiana’s senior captain took control.

Not Xavier Johnson, though both Indiana and Johnson looked visibly relieved to have the sixth-year senior back from an elbow injury. Johnson finished with five points and five turnovers, his coach suggesting afterward the one-time Pitt transfer was perhaps too eager to make his mark on his first game in nearly a month.

No, the last 5 ½ minutes Tuesday belonged to Trey Galloway. He scored just six points across 36 minutes, but he finished with four rebounds and, crucially, 12 assists. It was only the third such assist total by an Indiana player under Woodson (Johnson managed the feat in a March 2022 loss at Purdue, and Galloway did in IU’s recent loss to Northwestern).

This would come in a win, one that surely felt good for the senior captain who has willingly worn so much of his team’s misfortune this season. Galloway has tried to be a little bit of everything — point guard, shooting guard, perimeter scorer, ball-screen master, leader — for a team never quite possessing enough of anything to pile up enough wins. His dozen dimes Tuesday were testament to the feel for and control of the game he exhibited down the stretch.

Four of Galloway’s six second-half assists came inside the game’s final six minutes. The only one of IU’s last five made field goals Galloway did not assist was his own, a floater he landed with 1:47 left to tie the score at 70-apiece.

If Ware set the stage Tuesday, Galloway brought the house down.

“We’ve got a lot of trust in Galloway,” Woodson said. “We trust when the ball is in his hands he can make basketball plays. I thought tonight, he delivered for us.”

Now, the challenge spins forward. This is the sort of result upon which IU has consistently failed to build any forward momentum this winter. The Hoosiers’ best has only come in fits, and it’s realistically too late in the season for any serious, sustained push for the NCAA tournament.

That, Woodson knows, does not have to mean accepting surrender.

“We have to validate it,” he said. “I'm happy as hell we're off this slide, but now we got to go to Maryland who has played well at home, is playing well, and see if we can validate what we did this evening.”

For one night anyway — an admittedly unusual one even for a building well past the half-century mark now — Indiana got to feel good about itself. That good feeling was earned, and deserved by a handful most of all. Now, it’s up to everyone involved to make it worth more than just a relieved drive home.

Follow IndyStar reporter Zach Osterman on Twitter: @ZachOsterman.

This article originally appeared on Indianapolis Star: IU basketball losing streak ends on a strange night vs. Wisconsin