Indiana basketball identity seen in roster that 'manhandled' a blue blood prepared to stop it

BLOOMINGTON — First-year North Carolina coach Michael Malone spent much of his postgame news conference Sunday lamenting what his Tar Heels did not do, in their heavy exhibition loss to Indiana.

Did not get out and run, against a team with concerns defending in transition. Did not take advantage of defensive success, holding the Hoosiers to 36.2% from the floor, in a 76-58 IU win. Did not reach back for the emphases Malone and his staff drove into the plan for Sunday’s exhibition.

All that did not do, tracing back to one root cause.

“Just to be manhandled, to be outworked on the glass, was disappointing,” Malone said. “That’s on everybody, to make sure we’re rebounding. We did a really poor job of that.”

If IU coach Darian DeVries has his way, Malone’s Tar Heels won’t be the first team to swallow that difficult lesson this winter. Sunday’s win offered a firm reminder of the power of size, for a program efforting to embrace it.

Before last season — DeVries’ first with Indiana and in the Big Ten — even finished, Indiana’s coach was speaking openly about just how fundamental he had come to appreciate the need for greater size would be for his new program.

As teams like Michigan, Purdue and Illinois beat up on the Hoosiers, who tended to play with smaller, guard-based lineups familiar to many of DeVries’ stops as both an assistant and a coach, DeVries himself promised future rosters would be constructed to compete accordingly.

Then he went into the transfer portal and into Europe, landed three 7-footers and made good on that promise. Sam Alexis’ unexpected return, thanks to his securing a fifth year of eligibility, only deepened DeVries’ frontcourt options.

DeVries gladly put that depth to use against North Carolina.

“I told (Indiana) before the game: We’ve been talking about it all summer and fall. This is our identity,” DeVries said. “This is who we’re going to be. Embrace it, because we’re going to stay on it, stay on it, stay on it.”

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Trebling down on “stay on it” felt as emphatic as Indiana’s wider performance on the glass.

The Hoosiers finished plus-22 in rebound margin, pulling down an eye-popping 53 boards. They doubled North Carolina 20-10 on offensive rebounds, and outscored the Tar Heels 17-7 in second-chance points.

Two Hoosiers, Aiden Sherrell and Samet Yigitoglu, hit double figures on the glass.

All of which followed a similar performance at Butler a week earlier, when the Hoosiers outrebounded their host 53-33.

“That was a point of emphasis, all week long, in preparation for this team, knowing how big they are, with Samet and Aiden Sherrell and all the other guys,” Malone said.

What was disappointing for Malone was instructive for Indiana.

Sunday handed the Hoosiers a long look at all the problems good rebounding solves.

Not since the COVID-shortened 2020 season has Indiana put a team on the floor that finished in the top 50 nationally in either offensive or opponent offensive rebounding percentage. The Hoosiers haven’t been in the top 25 in either number since Tom Crean’s last season in Bloomington, per KenPom, and it’s not been since Crean’s 2013-14 season that IU posted truly elite two-way rebounding percentages.

That team struggled with shot making for much of the winter of 2014, yet kept its NCAA tournament hopes afloat until late February largely because it could solve so many of its problems by commanding the glass.

This one did the same on Sunday.

Despite that poor shooting performance, offensive boards frustrated North Carolina into extended defensive possessions, and Malone into more than one timeout. The transition defense DeVries worried about after the Butler win a week earlier wasn’t a problem, because too often the Tar Heels couldn’t complete the simple act of securing the ball to start the break.

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Strong rebounding lengthened offensive possessions and closed defensive ones, and widened over and over again Indiana’s margin for error in nearly all other facets of the game. The Hoosiers even shot 22 free throws to UNC’s 13, a function of both their aggression around the rim, and also forcing North Carolina into longer, more taxing defensive possessions that eventually ended in fouls.

“I’d like to make a few more of the first shots,” DeVries deadpanned afterward, smiling, “but again, that’s a night where maybe you don’t have it going. We weren’t very clean on the offensive end, but we were still able to overcome it.”

There will be more nights like that. This team should be good offensively, but nobody has it every night.

What Indiana will do consistently is field a lot of bigger, longer, more aggressive lineups, packed — unlike last season — with high-major experience. That should translate into more of what DeVries saw Sunday, and validate so much of what he’s preached throughout the offseason.

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Good rebounding solves your problems. Great rebounding creates them for your opponent. Indiana looks capable of both this season.

All the problems and obstacles Indiana’s inability to rebound the ball consistently threw up last winter, those become strengths now. What opponents leveraged on the Hoosiers, they can now turn around on others.

This is Indiana’s identity. The Hoosiers have embraced it. Soon enough, the Big Ten will have to as well.

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This article originally appeared on Indianapolis Star: Indiana basketball identity seen in roster that ‘manhandled’ a blue blood prepared to stop it