Penn State basketball preview: Lions end road swing at Indiana
Penn State basketball’s Big Ten schedule looks like a gauntlet even without any alterations on any given season.
After COVID-19 forced the cancellation of a winnable home game against Minnesota, a challenging portion of the Nittany Lions’ conference slate became even more difficult.
A tough three-game road swing concludes on Wednesday night in Indiana, as Penn State takes on the Hoosiers in Assembly Hall at 8:30 p.m.
The Nittany Lions have visited Ohio State, Iowa and now Indiana — ranked 26th, 20th and 33rd in KenPom’s ratings, respectively — since their last game inside the Bryce Jordan Center. They’re 0-for-2 so far, looking for a different outcome on attempt No. 3.
“Life in the Big Ten,” Penn State head coach Micah Shrewsberry said. “Game after game after game, they’re all challenging, they’re all tough. We need to prepare ourselves to win every single game. We need to execute our plan.
“We’ve been in two straight pretty tough environments at Ohio State, at Iowa. Then, you know, it gets tougher at Indiana. We’ve just got to prepare the exact same way, we’ve got to put ourselves in position to win.”
The Nittany Lions, of course, got the best of the Hoosiers when they visited the Bryce Jordan Center on January 2.
Jalen Pickett scored 15, and Penn State shot 11-22 from beyond the arc to score a 61-58 victory that day, marking Shrewsberry’s first conference win as head coach.
That game began a stretch of three solid offensive performances from the Nittany Lions. Against the Hoosiers, Northwestern and Purdue, Penn State posted Effective Field Goal Percentages (a metric that adjusts FG% to add more weight to 3-point shots) of 52, 53.6 and 54.5.
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The offensive performances in the three games since aren’t nearly as pretty. The Nittany Lions have scored 57.7 points per game in that span, including a dismal, 51-point showing in a loss at Iowa on Saturday. Penn State turned it over on nearly 20 percent of its possessions in that game.
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“I told our guys in the locker room, they out-coached us,” Shrewsberry said. “Fran McCaffrey out-coached me. Their starters outplayed our starters. Their bench outplayed our bench.
“From top to the bottom, we all need to be better.”
Penn State vs Indiana: Scouting the Hoosiers
Indiana sits at 14-5, and 5-4 in Big Ten play in Mike Woodson’s first season at the helm.
The Hoosiers have had a true roller coaster of a week. They beat then-No. 4 Purdue in dramatic fashion last Thursday, then got hammered by an underperforming Michigan team at home on Sunday, 80-62.
Indiana is efficient on offense and suffocating on defense. The Hoosiers shoot 47.5 percent from the field, which ranks 37th in the country. On the other end, they hold their opponents to just under 38 percent, good enough for 12th nationally. KenPom ranks Indiana as the 18th best defense in the country.
Individually, the hosts are led by forward Trayce Jackson-Davis. He averages 18.6 points per game on 60.1 percent shooting, and grabs 8.6 rebounds per game.
The Nittany Lions typically succeed in limiting the opposition’s best player, but Jackson-Davis scored 20 points when the Hoosiers visited State College.
Setting the odds
Penn State is an 8.5-point underdog in this game, according to the Vegas Insider Consensus. The over/under is set at 128 points.
