There's no hiding from what Saturday's 1 p.m. home game with Minnesota means for Nebraska's postseason goals.

Win it, and a second-straight NCAA Tournament appearance stays a healthy reality. Lose it, and a bad Quad 3 loss will go on the résumé and put Nebraska's goals on life support with a couple difficult games to finish the regular season — a road contest at Ohio State and a home tilt with Iowa inside Pinnacle Bank Arena.

This 18-team conference is a beast, filled with teams that can beat each other on any given night. Indiana and Ohio State both have eight league wins — and the Huskers own a tiebreaker over both. Nebraska is currently tied with Rutgers for 11th in the standings with seven wins. Iowa, Minnesota, Northwestern and USC all have six.

If the tournament was played Thursday morning, Nebraska would be the 12th seed because Rutgers owns the tiebreaker. Moral of the story is, there are still plenty of ways this Big Ten cookie can crumble.

What we do know for a fact — the bottom three teams in the standings won't qualify for the Big Ten Tournament, too, which is another thing to keep in mind.

"Obviously, everybody knows what's at stake with our remaining schedule," Fred Hoiberg said Thursday following practice inside Pinnacle Bank Arena. "But you can't look too far ahead, or you're going to get burned."

And Minnesota (14-14, 6-11 Big Ten) is certainly capable of a burn that would hurt Nebraska (17-11, 7-10) badly if the Gophers leave PBA with a win on Saturday.

Day/Time: Saturday at 1 p.m. CT

TV: BTN with Kevin Kugler and Shon Morris on the call.

Stream: Fox Sports App.

Listen: Huskers Radio Network with Kent Pavelka and Jake Muhleisen on the call, including KLIN (1400 AM) in Lincoln, KXSP (590 AM) in Omaha and KRVN (880 AM) in Lexington. The pregame show begins an hour before tipoff and will also be available on Huskers.com and the Huskers app.

Yes, Minnesota is coming off back-to-back losses at home to Northwestern (75-63) and Penn State (69-60). But one thing to know about Ben Johnson's crew is it has done well away from its home court in Minneapolis.

The Gophers are 4-4 on the road against Big Ten opponents, and that includes a stretch of three straight victories at UCLA, USC and Penn State. They're playing for a spot in the Big Ten Tournament.

"Teams are playing, and they are fighting and clawing and scratching. If you can get in a conference tournament, anything can happen in that setting," Hoiberg said. "So I promise you, everybody's fighting to get in. And then the tiebreak element as well. With playing a lot of teams only one time, that's going to be important when the seedings are going on for the conference tournament as well, and the byes and all that stuff. So there's a lot to be played out yet with all of us. And these last three games are obviously huge."

So Saturday's game is crucial. It'll be the first Stripe the Vault at PBA since the 2017-18 season.

"Downplay it, overplay it, whatever you want. These guys know the importance of where we are and what's in front of us and what possibly still could happen that hasn't been done in this program very often," Hoiberg said. "So these guys get the stakes right now."

The home teams have controlled this series, for what it's worth. Minnesota hasn't won a basketball game in Lincoln since February 2012 at the Devaney Center and are 0-10 when playing in PBA.

Following the ugly Penn State loss, Hoiberg chose to not put the hammer down on his players and instead chose to not watch the film from that night in Happy Valley. It was best to just move on.

But while the Michigan loss was ugly in its own right, with a dreadful offensive performance, Hoiberg had his team watch the film this time.

"That's about as long of an offensive edit as we've had," Hoiberg said. "Normally I'll keep it pretty short and concise and into one or two topics, but we were obviously not very good."

Hoiberg focused on the little things that went wrong. Too many times a Nebraska player was knocked to the floor. Far too often was there not enough heat at the rim that would've crated an open shot for a teammate.

"We even went back and watched really good offensive clips when we played with the right pace, when we played the right way, when we screened the bottom hip, when we followed the offensive game plan," Hoiberg said.

Having to sit for three games following his sprained left ankle injury from the Ohio State game didn't do Berke Büyüktuncel's offense any favors, as fans saw in the Michigan game.

While Büyüktuncel made a real impact on the defensive end, which was what kept Nebraska in the game, he went 0-of-10 from the field and missed all six of his 3s-point attempts.

"When you play this game and you play it at a high level, when you take that amount of time off, and you have very limited reps in practice, you're going to have some rust on you. And I think we saw that," Hoiberg said.

Hoiberg added he was "amazed" that Büyüktuncel played as many minutes — 31 — as he did against the Wolverines. Sprained ankles can negatively affect everything for a player, including their conditioning. But Büyüktuncel battled.

"It affects your legs. It affects your lungs. The fact that he was able to play 31 minutes, I was amazed that he was able to be out there that much," Hoiberg said. "So you expect some of that rust, and he'll get it back. He was coming into his own with his shot. It was looking better. And his shots, I thought, as the game went on, they were better. They were closer. He was short early, which, I think is happens when you come back from an injury like that."

The hope is, with more time to get back on the court and be a full participant at practice, his shot-making returns and he's able to stretch the floor, drag opposing bigs out of the paint and in turn create more lanes for teammates to cut to the paint.

Now in his fifth year of college basketball, Dawson Garcia has put himself in strong position to be a first-team All-Big Ten guy. The 6-11, 234-pounder is averaging 19.6 points, 7.6 rebounds and 2.0 assists while making 35% of his 3-pointers.

Against conference opponents, Garcia is averaging 20.1 points, third-best in the league behind Northwestern's Nick Martinelli (20.3) and some player named Brice Williams (20.2).

Garcia will enter the game with seven double-doubles on his résumé this season.

"He is so talented, and they run a lot of good stuff for him," Hoiberg said. "They'll let him handle the ball. They'll run small-on-big ball screens. They ISO him a lot, rightfully so with his talent level, especially on the elbows, in the short post. And he can shoot the three. So, he's a problem out there."

Though Garcia is the star and engine that makes Minnesota run, this will be a big KYP (know your personnel) game, Hoiberg said. As a team, Minnesota is shooting 32.9% from 3-point range against Big Ten opponents (Nebraska is second-to-last in the conference at 31.5%).

Outside of Garcia, no one in Minnesota's starting lineup is shooting better than 33% from 3.

"You got to understand who you're guarding, who you're closing out to, who you want to run off the three-point line, and then who you want to short close to if they're more of a driver," Hoiberg said. "So this is a big game, maybe as big as we'll play, because there's so much attention that's going to be drawn to Dawson Garcia."

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