Indiana’s 90-66 win over Tennessee Tech on Thursday night at Simon Skjodt Assembly Hall gave the Hoosiers a clean 4-0 start, but the game also offered a sharper look at what this team can already do well - and where the real tests still wait.
The biggest positive came on the defensive end. Tennessee Tech arrived in Bloomington with a reputation for putting up points, after scoring 88 in a road loss to Mississippi State and 97 against Western Kentucky. Indiana answered by holding the Golden Eagles to 66 points and .87 points per possession, a strong step forward from the first three games.
The Hoosiers were only up four at halftime, but they handled Tennessee Tech’s shot volume better as the game went on. The Golden Eagles fired away from deep and Indiana made them work for it, limiting them to 9-for-31 from 3-point range.
Tennessee Tech also shot just 15-for-39 on 2s, or 38.5 percent. That mattered because IU’s first three opponents had each hit at least 55 percent of their 2-point tries.
Indiana still has a lot to clean up defensively, and next week’s matchups with Arkansas and Kentucky will tell a lot more, but Thursday showed the Hoosiers can be better on that end than they had been.
Markus Burton was a different player after halftime. He had a rough first 20 minutes, going scoreless and picking up two fouls in 10 minutes before the break.
Then he took over in the second half, scoring 12 points, handing out five assists and grabbing three rebounds in 14 minutes after halftime. He finished with seven assists, the most in the game, and went 4-for-4 at the line.
“He distributed, he scored, he put a lot of pressure on the defense,” Darian DeVries said of Burton. “He’s really bought into what we’re trying to ask, and then he’s trying to go execute it.”
Bryce Lindsay kept giving Indiana a lift off the bench, especially while Burton was quiet early. He scored seven points in 15 first-half minutes, and the Hoosiers were plus-5 with him on the floor.
Lindsay didn’t pile up assists, but he kept the defense busy with constant pressure, always hunting a shot from the perimeter or a lane to the rim. He ended with 15 points in 25 minutes and was perfect at the foul line, going 4-for-4.
Through four games, he leads IU at 13.8 points per game.
“I thought offensively, again, he opened it up,” DeVries said. “We didn’t shoot really well.
We didn’t get a ton of 3s up for the game, 20 for us, which isn’t a ton. I thought he got some pretty good ones there in the second half and kind of broke it open.”
Indiana also spent a lot of the night at the free-throw line, thanks in part to Tennessee Tech’s full-court pressure. The Golden Eagles pressed for all 40 minutes, and IU had some shaky stretches handling it, finishing with a turnover on 18.5 percent of its possessions. But as the game wore on, Tennessee Tech’s pressure lost some bite, and Indiana got better at turning those possessions into actual offense instead of just escaping trouble.
The foul count told another part of the story. Tennessee Tech’s pressure and ball-hawking approach put Indiana in the bonus often, and the Hoosiers made it count. IU posted a free-throw rate of 66.7 percent, shot 26-for-36 from the line and outscored Tennessee Tech by 17 points there.
Inside, Samet Yigitoglu was a problem Tennessee Tech never solved. The 7-foot-2 big man scored Indiana’s first six points, using the size advantage in the paint right away.
His night briefly hit a snag when he was struck just above the eye and had to leave for stitches, but he returned and added two more baskets before halftime. He led IU with 10 points at the break and finished with 18 on 9-for-10 shooting.
Most of his looks came with little resistance, either at the rim or on simple finishes inside, because Tennessee Tech didn’t have the size or the interior defense to make him work. That kind of presence can matter beyond the box score, too, because it can force help and open the floor for Indiana’s shooters.
“I can bring double-teams on the post,” Yigitoglu said. “So when they double the post, somebody will be open on the perimeter. So our shooters like Markus, like DH, Bryce, I’m just creating space for them in the low post.”
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