When the IU Indianapolis men’s basketball team (5-16) tipped off in their gold “Metros” jerseys against Detroit Mercy (8-10), it appeared that they were all but ready to continue what they had going on Thursday night when they upset Robert Morris for their first Horizon League win of the season.
Freshman forward Reece Hagy, who hit a big free throw late in overtime against the Colonials, started off this one with a steal, a three-pointer, and a rebound before the game was three minutes in as the Jaguars grabbed a 5-0 lead.
That advantage would stretch out to as many as ten in the first half, and the Jaguars would lead for more than half of the game, but it wouldn’t be enough, as they eventually fell to the Titans, 80-77, even after a furious final minute in which another IU Indy freshman, Maguire Mitchell, hit two-three pointers while the home team tried to extend the game by fouling a Detroit Mercy team that made 8 of their last ten free throws.
“Just told the guys, ‘I’ve never felt better going into a game than I did with this game,'” IU Indy coach Ben Howlett said, “because I thought, ‘Finally we got that win,’ and we played really hard, and we were focused on Detroit. I thought we had a great day yesterday; our shoot-around had a lot of juice, and, you know, just didn’t play smart. It’s a bizarre feeling because, you know, they’ve been on the road for a couple days, and usually those are the teams that struggle, and we just didn’t take advantage of it. So we’ve got to get back to the drawing board.”
Part of the not playing smart, it would seem, was shot selection, and more specifically, from the three-point line. The Jaguars have made the third most three-pointers of any teams in the Horizon League this season – about ten a game – but only at the ninth best percentage. In this one, they made the same amount of three-pointers as Detroit Mercy did (six), but they shot twelve more of them (29) in order to get there.
Howlett expressed concern afterwards about the wisdom of some of those shots. “I thought we rushed some shots,” he said. “I thought we didn’t take smart shots. I thought we did a really good job of that against Robert Morris, you know we limited our three-point attempts, and today I thought we had some guys pressing to try to make some threes and try to make some plays, things were our way early. We got up to a 10-point lead, and then we had a couple bad possessions there where we shot, you know, some contested threes, and that’s when they made their run. Kind of same thing in the second half. We got up eight, and we had some bad possessions where we forced some shots. That’s the outcome of the game.”
To drill Howlett’s point home, the Jaguars shot 8-for-18 from the three-point line against the Colonials, whereas against the Titans, Kameron Tinsley was 0-for-5, Aiden Miller was 0-for-3 (after going 4-for-6 on Thursday night), and Micah Davis went 2-for-8. They got balanced scoring in the game from Davis (12), Kyler D’Augustino (20), Jaxon Edwards (13), and Finley Woodward (15), but Detroit Mercy’s 8-point scoring run toward the end of the first half and another 9-point run late in the second half sealed the deal, in spite of Mitchell’s last-ditch efforts, which were his only two made three-pointers (he was 0-for-4 before those two) of the game, too.
“We just got to get stuff going to the rim more,” Mitchell said. “We’re shooting a lot of threes, and I feel like if we, you know, get to the rim more it’ll open up, like, more open threes for us. And I just think that’s the big idea, just shooting more open looks instead of coming off screens and maybe like a little hand in your face.”
IU Indy will get its next shot on the road on Wednesday at 7 p.m. against Greg Kampe’s Oakland club.
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