WEST LAFAYETTE, Ind. (AP) – Indiana’s Kevin ”Yogi” Ferrell spent the second half doing everything he could to get the offense in sync.
He bobbed and weaved. He dribbled to the basket. He lined up long-range and mid-range shots. But the junior point guard essentially reverted to being a one-man show Wednesday.
Ferrell scored 15 of his 21 points in the second half, and Purdue clamped down on the Big Ten’s highest-scoring team and pulled away for an 83-67 victory over its archrival.
”When you get off to a bad start, especially playing away, it’s kind of hard to get back into the game when the other team’s fans are behind them,” Ferrell said. ”We just never picked it up.”
The latest frustrating lesson for the Hoosiers (15-6, 5-3), who have lost two straight for the first time all season, looked a lot like last season.
Ferrell accounted for more than one-third of Indiana’s baskets, nine of 25. The only other Indiana player to reach double figures was freshman James Blackmon Jr. who had 13.
That’s not how the Hoosiers have changed the script this season, and coach Tom Crean knows that if his team is going to be successful, it cannot afford a repeat of what happened against the Boilermakers.
”I think our impatience offensively turned into easy baskets,” Crean said. ”We don’t need to be complicated and we don’t have guys that are good enough to play a complicated game. By complicated I mean, go in and try to create things that aren’t there.”
For Purdue (13-8, 5-3) it was another stunning twist in a turnaround season.
The Boilermakers have now won three of the last four.
And after ending a 13-game losing streak against ranked teams with Saturday’s win over Iowa, the Boilermakers have pulled off back-to-back upsets. They’re also off to their best conference start since going 6-2 in 2010-11, and they’ve already matched last season’s victory total in league play.
How has Purdue done it? With balanced scoring and a defense that seems to be getting better by the game.
”We were able to get into those guys and make things tough,” Rapheal Davis said after scoring 19 points. ”We limited their open looks, got into them early, and got physical early.”
In addition to Davis’ big night, Bryson Scott had 11 points and six rebounds while A.J. Hammons finished with 11 points and a career-high eight blocks — the highest single-game total of any Purdue player other than Joe Barry Carroll, who set the record of 11 in 1977 and had nine in another game in 1978.
In the first half, Indiana went nearly 5 1/2 minutes without a basket. After ending that drought, they managed just one basket in the next five minutes – a drought that put the Hoosiers in a 30-15 hole that it never recovered from.
With a sellout crowd roaring almost from the moment Mackey Arena filled up, Purdue didn’t disappoint.
The Boilermakers used a 10-0 spurt to pull out to a 17-6 lead midway through the first half and followed that with a 10-3 run to make it 30-15.
Indiana got as close as 34-26 with 1:48 left, but gave up a buzzer-beating layup to fall into a 38-27 halftime deficit.
Purdue scored the first eight points of the second, and Indiana never got closer than 10 the rest of the way.
TIP-INS
Hoosiers: Indiana came into the game averaging 81.4 points this season. But it’s been a different story in Big Ten play. Indiana has been held to fewer than 80 points six times in eight league games including Wednesday night when they shot just 37.9 percent from the field and had just nine baskets in the first 23 minutes.
Boilermakers: Free throws had been a major problem all season for Purdue – until Wednesday. Purdue put away this victory by going 25 of 33 from the line. It was a stark contrast to their previous six games, when they were just 68 of 117, and their free-throw percentage of 66.8 coming into Wednesday’s game.
UP NEXT
Hoosiers: Host Rutgers on Saturday.
Boilermakers: Visit Northwestern on Saturday.
LOOKING AHEAD
The Hoosiers can’t afford to let Wednesday’s loss linger. After Rutgers, they visit No. 5 Wisconsin, host defending Big Ten champ Michigan and travel to No. 16 Maryland. The good news: Six of their last 10 Big Ten games are at home.
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