What I'm watching IU vs. Penn State: A game Hoosiers need to win — and with some conviction

BLOOMINGTON – On the back of a 2-1 week, Indiana’s road eases slightly into its built-in Big Ten bye.

The Hoosiers host Penn State on Wednesday before going to Maryland over the weekend. Then, they get seven days off before Illinois comes to town.

First up are the Nittany Lions, a team that defeated IU in State College slightly more than three weeks ago at the restart of conference play. The Hoosiers cannot afford a repeat result.

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What will it take? Here are three things I’ll be watching:

Indiana’s response

To Penn State somewhat — the Hoosiers, for example, cannot allow a pedestrian 3-point shooting team to make 11 of them as it did in Happy Valley three weeks ago — but more so to the Michigan letdown.

There is a degree to which Indiana could be forgiven for the circumstances which led to its heavy defeat Sunday. It was IU’s third game in seven days. Some sort of physical and emotional hangover from Purdue was virtually impossible to avoid, and a weakness against a much better-rested Michigan team. The Wolverines, despite their poor start to the season, are still among the league’s most talented outfits, and perhaps the worst possible matchup for Indiana.

All that is excusable if the Hoosiers respond well. That starts with beating Penn State.

The Big Ten is going to provide its share of opportunities for quality wins. It doesn’t throw up very many dangerous losses. This would be one. Despite their win over IU on Jan. 2, the Nittany Lions aren’t a top-75 team in KenPom, T-Rank or the NCAA’s NET rankings. They’re 3-5 to start Big Ten play, and have won just once in their past four tries.

Indiana doesn’t declare itself fixed with a win Wednesday (and there’s a further conversation to be had about the road trip this weekend to College Park). But backstopping Michigan with a solid home win allows IU to paint Sunday’s ugliness as more isolated than spreading, more the exception than the rule. This is a game Indiana needs to win, and it would help to win with some conviction.

Lineup shuffle

Presented a probing question about the possibility of mixing up his starting five, Mike Woodson didn’t actively endorse the idea. But a coach who has been pretty direct on certain topics across the course of this season also didn’t dismiss it out of hand.

Across Indiana’s past five games, its starting lineup (Xavier Johnson, Parker Stewart, Miller Kopp, Race Thompson, Trayce Jackson-Davis) has also been its most preferred by some distance. In that stretch, Woodson has had that combination on the floor 26% of the time, and the next four combinations — none of which include Kopp and only one of which includes Stewart — 26.8% of the time.

Kopp and Stewart are mentioned there for two reasons. First, theirs appear the positions most under threat from bench players, namely Rob Phinisee, Trey Galloway and Jordan Geronimo. Second, both have contributed to Indiana’s growth this season, but both have also proved streaky in their offensive production, when either IU cannot get them clean looks from behind the 3-point line or they can’t convert them.

The turnabout is, impact you insert into the starting lineup you lose off the bench, and vice-versa. If Stewart plays fewer minutes with Johnson or Jackson-Davis — two of Indiana’s best shot creators in transition and post-up situations — does he get as many quality looks? If you take Galloway out of what is effectively this team’s second line, who fills the playmaking/ball-handling void he leaves behind? And so on.

Woodson hasn’t found quite the ideal balance in his rotations yet, but they have clarified and will continue to in the next few weeks. Whether that clarification includes some changes to the starting lineup remains to be seen, but it at least warrants consideration.

3-point shooting

This never promised to be a prolific 3-point shooting team, but across the season’s first two months, it was a more efficient one. That efficiency is receding as the Hoosiers get deeper into conference play.

In Big Ten games alone, IU is hitting just 30.3% of its 3-pointers, a dip of more than 3.5% from its season-wide team average. Since the turn of the year and the resumption of conference play, the Hoosiers have shot better than 32% from distance in a single game just once, across seven.

Anecdotally, it has felt like Indiana struggles to consistently get its best 3-point shooters open, and to find more shots for players like Stewart and Kopp. The former in particular could use more volume, as a top-100 3-point shooter nationally and one of the Big Ten’s best sharpshooters in conference games alone.

Stewart has at least one made 3 in five of Indiana’s past seven games, and two or more in four of those seven. He hit three against Michigan on Sunday, but all of them came when the Hoosiers were down double digits and chasing a game already beyond reach. More volume, and more of it early, would help.

No one should ever expect this group to become one of the nation’s (or even the Big Ten’s) most devastating 3-point shooting teams. But the progress of November and December has receded in January. Woodson needs to arrest that dip.

Follow IndyStar reporter Zach Osterman on Twitter: @ZachOsterman.

This article originally appeared on Indianapolis Star: Indiana basketball vs. Penn State preview: A must-win for Hoosiers