How preparation, coaching helped Penn State basketball beat Indiana

The week leading up to Sunday’s win over Indiana probably didn’t involve very much fun for Penn State’s basketball players, Micah Shrewsberry acknowledged.

It might as well have been an abbreviated preseason camp. The Nittany Lions practiced twice a day, looking to find their legs again after positive COVID-19 test results kept them off the practice floor for two weeks.

“They came in the morning, practiced, went home, they slept, they ate and they came back and they practiced again,” Shrewsberry said. “It wasn’t like we’re gonna get a couple of shots up. We competed. That’s how you have to play in this league. That’s what those guys did.”

Shrewsberry and his players each portrayed the three-week gap the Nittany Lions endured between games as an opportunity for positive growth.

It gave Penn State plenty of time to go over the film from its 5-5 start to the season. By the time Sunday rolled around, they were itching to get going.

“It just made us hungry to play as well,” guard Myles Dread said. “Not playing for 22 days is tough, but these last six days, we had 11 practices. So, we got after it and we got a lot better. We came back and we had fire in our gut and we were ready to go.”

Shrewsberry took a thinker’s approach to the break, evaluating how things went through the first 10 games of the season and considering what needed to change.

“We used the break to look at: How can we improve?” Shrewsberry said. “What are we doing good? What are we doing bad? How can we improve? And we focused on that for like four days, then we started preparing for Indiana.”

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The preparation turned out to be crucial. Shrewsberry and Penn State’s staff made a few subtle tweaks that influenced the game’s outcome considerably.

On offense, the Nittany Lions designed a system that would help them get good looks from 3-point range against a stout Indiana defense. No team had shot more than 39 percent from beyond the arc against the Hoosiers — who own the Big Ten’s best overall defense, according to KenPom.

Penn State shot 11-22 from 3-point land. Dread hit four, and Jalen Pickett added three as he led Penn State with 15 points.

Shrewsberry wouldn’t reveal exactly what the Nittany Lions changed, with an eye toward a rematch in Bloomington later this year. But Indiana coach Mike Woodson expressed frustration in how his team handled Penn State’s pick-and-roll action.

“I thought the difference was us impacting the ball from a pick-and-roll standpoint,” Woodson said. “We were terrible in that area. Just awful.”

Shrewsberry pulled a trick out of his sleeve on defense, too. The Nittany Lions showed a zone look, something they’ve rarely done this season.

It helped Penn State keep the Hoosiers off-balance on offense, as they scored a season-low 58 points. The ability to switch between man and zone out of timeouts also proved important, Shrewsberry said, because he knows first-hand from his NBA experience that Woodson dials up dead-ball plays better than most coaches.

“He was with the Knicks at the time, so we played them four times,” Shrewsberry said. “They were in our division when I was in Boston. What he did out of timeouts was fantastic. I still remember, he runs such good stuff. He puts his guys in position.

“When he gets a chance to huddle those guys and talk to them, I thought he could really pick us apart. So we worked on it. We’ve been working on it a little bit here and there. I just wanted to try to keep him off-balance a little bit.”