Indiana women’s basketball cruised to a 95-50 win over Florida Gulf Coast in its season opener on Tuesday night at Assembly Hall in Bloomington.
This is a pretty new team overall, with the only consistent contributors from last year being Lenee Beaumont, Maya Makalusky and Zania Socka-Nguemen. Indiana’s transfers played well and its freshmen saw decent minutes.
Here’s three observations from the game:
Sharing the ball well
This is a Teri Moren team, after all. Four of the six Hoosiers to play 19 minutes or more finished
with at least an assist with USC transfer Malia Samuels leading the way with five from the point.
Jessica Petrie and Makalusky, both forwards, were just behind her with three assists apiece. It came on a less efficient shooting night for Indiana, which hit just 33.3% from 3-point range and 43.5% from the field in general and alongside 17 turnovers.
Turnovers are perhaps Moren’s No. 1 pet peeve as a head coach, so that’s probably the number that stuck in her head after the game. Look for that to go down as this roster plays more games together.
Some, uh, foul calls
Listen. I know it’s gauche to complain about refereeing at all, let alone in the first game of the season, but this was some truly ridiculous work.
It wasn’t even slanted, that’s not the thing at all. There were a combined 44 fouls called on the game with Indiana getting 20 and FGCU getting 24. The fouls on the Hoosiers were pretty spread out, nobody had more than three, but the Eagles had a player foul out in the third quarter with two other players ending the game with four fouls to their name.
It’s been a pretty consistent issue for the sport and messes with game flow. You can’t just not call fouls but the whistle is way too inconsistent.
Winning the battle on the boards
That shooting inefficiency I mentioned earlier for Indiana was negated by the fact that it won the rebounding battle 47-32. The Hoosiers didn’t score too many second chance points, just 7, but were able to firmly end several Eagles possessions on the defensive end.
Do I think this will be a great rebounding team? Not necessarily. Can it be a pretty good one? I think so. Indiana doesn’t have one dominant force on the boards outside of Socka-Nguemen, relying on its forwards and wings to get into position with size and effort, the latter being a consistent hallmark of Moren’s program.
It’s something I’ll be watching in the games to come.
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