What Teri Moren Said After Indiana’s 73-66 Loss To No. 4 USC

BLOOMINGTON, Ind. – In front of a white-out crowd Sunday afternoon at Simon Skjodt Assembly Hall, Indiana fell just short in a 73-66 loss to the No. 4 USC Trojans.

Indiana led by as many as 11 points in the second quarter, but USC closed the half on a 24-7 run. The Hoosiers made it close at the end, trailing 70-66 with 1:25 to play, but couldn’t close it out. Sydney Parrish led Indiana with 16 points, and JuJu Watkins led the Trojans with 22 points.

Opening statement

Moren: “Great crowd. Really grateful that our fans came out and supported not just us, women’s basketball, today. As I continue to tell them, they make it such a great experience for our players, but they make it a great experience for all women’s basketball players. So I’m sure coach Lindsay [Gottlieb] talked about just the atmosphere and how incredible it was. So, again, just thankful. Really proud of our players. It’s not the result that we wanted. I thought coming down the stretch, we had a couple back-to-back turnovers that were pretty crucial. They had 17 points off of our turnovers. There were three keys going into the game for us. The first was to keep them out of transition, and we [gave up] 17 points off of fast-break points, I guess. We wanted to keep them off the free throw line, didn’t do a very good job. Because when you look at how they scored, it doesn’t seem that overwhelming, and then you look at the free throws, and that’s the game right there. Then we wanted to do a great job on the boards. I thought our kids battled on the boards. This is a team that’s plus-seven in that category. I think our kids gave us everything they had as far as to do a good job of rebounding the ball. So obviously USC is a very talented team with a great coaching staff. It was, I thought, a really great game with two really good opponents. So like I said, disappointed that we came up short, but I thought there were a lot of good things that we did.”

On the biggest difference in the fourth quarter…

Moren: “I just think, unfortunately, Chloe came down and turned it over back-to-back times, and that sort of took a little bit of the wind out of us. Because we had been trying to run good offense and really trying to put pressure on them to force them to run action, forcing them to have to guard action, and then we just turn it over on a reversal, turn it over on an entry pass, and both of those ended up in runouts. And I’m not blaming – Chloe was great, but those were two back-breakers that you just can’t have going down the stretch against a team like USC. So I thought we did them a favor. We didn’t make them guard.”

On the frustration of losing with fine margins against a good team and what IU can learn…

Moren: “I think there’s always something they can learn. I think we learned going down the stretch we can’t turn the ball over. That’s easy stuff. But when I look back at UCLA, I look back at today, we just gotta hit shots. It’s that easy. If that’s the lesson we gotta learn – I think we got some really good ones, we just didn’t hit them. Syd Parrish got some really good looks. Yarden got some really good looks. Same with UCLA. We look back and we’re like, ‘We hit a couple more shots and we win this game.’ So they’re battling and they’re trying after such a poor performance the other night against Illinois, it was good to see them come back. But they just can’t get up for the big ones. We gotta be up for all of them, because they’re all so hard to win and they know that. At the end of the day, you look back, and we’re gonna watch it, talk about some of the things we did well and some of the things we gotta clean up. But we gotta hit shots.”

On if she was happy with Karoline Striplin’s play in her first start…

Moren: “I was, yeah. Strip has been very reliable, and she’s smart, she understands the game plan. And it was great to see Lilly come in and impact the game the way she did, and part of that is we felt like Lilly’s been playing with a little bit of extra pressure on her. So bringing her off the bench was intentional to just get her to relax a little bit. We knew that she was gonna play. We knew that we need both of them. But Strip was, I thought, really good for us today.”

On if the plan is to keep Striplin in the starting lineup…

Moren: “As of right now, yeah, there would be no reason we would take her out.”

On what she tells Yarden Garzon after going 3 for 17 from the field…

Moren: “Well again, she’s just gonna have to – and she does – she gets in the gym and she does her work and we need her. We need her to score for us. And so we just kind of keep doing what we’re going, pouring into her, encouraging her and just being her biggest cheerleaders right now that she’s a great shooter. She can make plays for us, she had six assists, she showed that. But we just need her to score at a higher rate. They were icing a lot of her ball screens. They were being physical with her. So those are things that she’s gonna have to learn to play in spite of the way people guard her and are physical with her. And maybe we gotta, like I said, I thought she got some really great looks that didn’t go down. But we’ll go back and look if there’s ways, maybe, that we can get her a little loose, maybe get her going early, where she sees some of those go down. But we gotta stay the course for her because we know how important she is.”

On if she thinks the team is very close to clicking with everything…

Moren: “I don’t know that we’re this close [fingers close together]. I think we were trending in a really good direction after we got back from early on, going to Iowa, winning at Iowa was hard, and then we come back and we certainly took a step back, I thought, the other night against a really good Illinois team that came in and really shot it well inside the Hall. But again, I go back to all of them are so important. This is such a great league, and we can’t have a different mindset against UCLA, against USC. The mindset, the strategy, being engaged in what we’re trying to do, it has to, night in and night out, it has to be the same no matter what the opponent is. Our window, as we know, is very – our room for error is very small. And we gotta be so good on so many levels, whether it’s coverages, whether it’s our actions that we’re running offensively and there’s screening actions and there’s things that are happening inside the actions that we can’t forget to do, executing, all of it. We gotta just keep our head down, keep grinding and realize that it’s a marathon, it’s not a sprint.”

On how her team prepared for USC after not practicing well before the Illinois game…

Moren: “I thought they bounced back. Like I said to them after a tough night the other night, certainly they returned the next day, on Friday, because we didn’t have a day off, and anytime you have to watch yourself on film, the energy, you get their attention that way because they see all the things they could have done differently. So typically when you go back into practice, energy’s up, enthusiasm is where it needs to be, the focus is right there. And so as I said to them on Friday before they left, today was a good day, but can we stack another good day Saturday? And they did. And they did. I thought they were dialed into what we wanted them to do offensively, defensively. You look down and JuJu had 22 points, but we made her work like crazy and I’m really proud of Lexi. I thought Lexi did a good job. I thought Chloe did a good job. Other than the fouls, I thought defensively we were on point with how we wanted to guard them.”

On Watkins saying she got used to Indiana’s defense and how Indiana can change that…

Moren: “I don’t know how she got used to it because we kept changing up the defense on her, right. We didn’t play all man. We went to a little bit of a box and one. So that’s what you do, you try to – we corralled a little bit, we shaded a little bit more throughout, so there’s nothing that we would have done differently. I thought she had to work extremely hard, and I stand by what I said. I thought Chloe and Lexi did a great job on her.”

On travels plans for later in the week, going to Oregon and Washington…

Moren: “Well, we’re gonna do short tomorrow, and then we’re gonna take Tuesday off. I think we leave Wednesday, and then I think we’ll get out there – is that a day earlier? – two days earlier, so we’ll get kind of acclimated to the time change, have an opportunity to practice like we have been the two days prior to playing. And then we’ll stay out there.”

On her message to the team being closer to the NCAA Tournament bubble than normal…

Moren: “Well, I mean, they know that every game is very important in this league. That’s what you do. It’s a one-game season, and they know that. Every game is really important to what we want to be able to do, and that’s to play in March. So we just gotta keep focusing on the things that we have to keep improving on and getting better, and I think we will. We got a lot of faith in these guys.”