As expected, Iowa is running its offense through its most potent weapon in the post this season.
The only question is: who the heck knew it would be senior center Addi O'Grady?
O'Grady scored 14 of her team's first 16 points en route to a 27-point, 10-rebound, three-block performance as the Hawkeyes survived their first road test of the season, 86-73 over Drake in Des Moines, Iowa. Lucy Olsen added 18 points and six assists (tied for a team high), with a quiet-ish 16 from junior forward Hannah Stuelke.
"They were over-rotating, and that led to easy buckets for me," said O'Grady. "I had guards on me a lot of times in the first few minutes of the game, and I was able to take advantage of that."
Jan Jensen enjoyed a victorious, sometimes emotional return to her alma mater, with retired head coach and mentor Lisa Bluder and Des Moines native Caitlin Clark there in the stands. Jensen is one of three Bulldog's women's basketball players with their number retired, as Bluder coached her to a 29.7-ppg senior season.
"I tell you what, you kind of grow up here [in college]," said Jensen. "How many people can say that they've really gotten to be such a special part of two really good programs? That's where I feel so blessed."
THE DEEP THREE
1. The Addi O'Grady Game. Coming into the season, O'Grady was barely the star-in-waiting at center on her own team, much less in the Big Ten or beyond; true freshman Ava Heiden, a bouncy 6'4" post from Sherwood, Oregon, had "really begun to separate herself" as starting center as recently as Media Day in October, per Jensen.
Fast-forward past a Heiden illness that left the door open for O'Grady to start in the exhibition win over Missouri Western, and Iowa's 6'4" senior from Aurora, Colorado has become the latest big under Jensen to blossom in the role of Iowa's, well, centerpiece.
"Just doing the work early is one of my biggest takeaways from [Jensen]," said O'Grady. "Once I do my work before the ball even gets to me, then it's an easy shot."
Once Drake realized it had to commit to disrupting O'Grady on the interior, the center's production returned to mortal human levels, but the attention paid to the post opened up the rest of Iowa's offense.
"Right away, it was obviously working going inside to me and Hannah," said O'Grady. "Once they started packing in the paint, we were able to dish it out for some easy threes and got our guards off the cuts."
"That inside presence, if you can stay efficient with how you score, you can counter all their small-ball action," said Jensen. "We were hopeful that Addi was going to have a game, but I try not to put that much pressure and expectation, because this was the first time she's really wearing that role — wearing the 'go-to,' wearing the 'hey, we're going to go inside to Addi'."
O'Grady's 27 points are a career high, topping the 18 she scored against Virginia Tech on 9-of-9 shooting a week ago. While her recent successes have looked meteoric at times, O'Grady credits a years-long growth in confidence under the tutelage of Iowa's staff over the years — as well as the opportunity to showcase that growth.
"I have grown tremendously in my confidence," said O'Grady. "Getting a bunch of minutes and getting into a rhythm this early in the season has been really good for my confidence so far."
Despite rocketing nine points past her previous career high, O'Grady's o'greatest impact on the game likely showed up in someone else's box score. Senior Drake forward Anna Miller, fresh off winning Player of the Week in the Valley, was held to a horrific 1-for-17 effort from the field and finished with six points in the loss. As a team, the Bulldogs only converted 5-of-17 layups Sunday, and the team eventually stopped challenging O'Grady in the post.
"I was really pleased," said Jensen. "The biggest compliment I can give her was I'm now starting to have Czinano and Gustafson expectations."
It wasn't a perfect outing -- O'Grady was credited with six turnovers on the day, and she was one of the five Hawkeyes who found themselves on the precipice of foul trouble by the end of the contest. But if a coach like Jensen is finding room for improvement in a performance as forceful as O'Grady's, that's a terrifying proposition for the rest of the Big Ten.
"The expectations are growing," said Jensen. "But I only know they're growing because I know [O'Grady] can do it."
2. Also, the Katie Dinnebier Game. O'Grady's two-way dominance is usually the stuff of blowouts, but it turned out to be a necessity Sunday. Kylie Feuerbach, widely hailed as Iowa's best on-ball defender on the perimeter, found herself as Drake point guard Katie Dinnebier's most frequent target in a 40-point barrage for the Bulldogs' most potent perimeter weapon.
"I've been a fan of Katie's since she was at Waukee," said Jensen after the game. "Actually, I'm a big fan of Drake's team. I'd like to think we play pretty similarly. We recruit a lot of similar kids. I recruited half their lineup."
Dinnebier led a one-woman parade to the charity stripe, going 17-for-20 there as five Hawkeyes found themselves teetering on the edge of fouling out by the end of the game. Crucially, though, none fouled out as the young Hawkeyes kept their composure late.
"I try to stay steady," said Jensen. "We were just trying to tell them, 'okay, we practiced — we've been in all these situations.' You try to do game situations. This team, what I really love about them is they're really for each other. They don't get too down on each other if someone gives up a layup or blows a switch or whatever."
While Miller's ineffectiveness was part of the reason Dinnebier led the offense so heavily — 28 of the guard's game-high 40 points came after halftime — it's safe to say that if O'Grady and her cohorts allow even a pedestrian offensive performance from the senior forward, that game stays close a lot longer, and while Iowa now owns wins in 21 of its last 22 games against Drake, things tend to stay weird late at the Knapp Center.
"If you look back in this series, Drake plays a lot of five-out, or what I call 'small ball,' and it's really good," said Jensen. "And it's hard if you have a traditional center. So going back to our [Megan] Gustafson years and our [Monika] Czinano years, when we have won it, it usually goes down to the wire over here [in Des Moines]."
3. First road test passed. Drake is a likely tournament team, albeit one that'll have to win its conference tournament as an automatic qualifier; right now, it's slated as a 13-seed by ESPN in the always-incredibly-important mid-November Bracketology projections. With the tourney pedigree comes a tourney-quality road environment, and the home Des Moines faithful held up their end of the bargain Sunday afternoon.
"It was really fun being next to the student section, and they were heckling us," said O'Grady. "Those are the games you look forward to the most. Just really fun and a charged environment."
Of course, back on Drake's campus where Lisa Bluder once stalked the sidelines and coached a young Jan Jensen, where a young Caitlin Clark grew up going to Bulldog women's basketball games and where so many more familiar Hawkeye faces helped develop their passion for the game, Sunday's environment could only be so hostile to Jensen.
"I was even kind of missing my buddies, Lisa and Jenni [Fitzgerald]," said Jensen of her colleagues who retired during the offseason. "We usually just simmer, like 'We're good, we're good, you good? We're good, right?', but honestly, when the ball went up, then it was like 95% of people here didn't even probably realize I played here."
That's a bit of an underestimation of Jensen's legacy — presumably, a lot more than five percent of attendees noticed her jersey hanging ceremoniously next to the scoreboard, both before and after tipoff — but Sunday's game was, indeed, a pleasant reminder of how fun in-state basketball can be regardless of the legacies of this coach or that.
The Knapp Center was molten hot for the Bulldogs' 5-for-7 start from deep, and nearly registered a seismic effect after one highlight-worthy stretch from Miller and Dinnebier chopped Iowa's lead back to five points in the third quarter.
"It's a game of runs, especially on your home floor," said Jensen. "So I just try to keep telling them, 'Look, you're answering.' 'Yes, we've given it up, but you did this.' And I really think that they believe that and have bought into that."
Every time Drake pushed, though, Iowa was able to answer with a run of its own, including a 10-0 run at the end of the first half that turned a tied (and evenly played) game into one where Iowa had a significant cushion for an experienced team like Drake's inevitable runs to follow.
"I think we handled [the atmosphere] really well," said O'Grady. "Obviously they went on their runs, but we really limited it, and I don't think we let the crowd or the refs or anything outside of our team get to us."
"That was especially huge, especially for our relatively younger team in the minutes that they've played in big games," said Jensen. "In the past we had a lot of players that were in these big games, but they dominated a lot of the minutes. So I thought that [10-0 run] was a pretty huge spurt for them to go in [to halftime] knowing they did something well. I thought that was hugely important."
Teagan Mallegni led that spurt with eight of her 13 points off the bench, including a pair of consecutive three-pointers that ballooned Iowa's lead to 10 before the halftime horn. Though the scoring was largely hers, the opportunities came off forced turnovers and one-and-done defensive rebounds that led to transition jumpers.
"Our team really stepped it up in those moments," said Mallegni. "We were grittier in that stretch, which led to those baskets."
"It's been really fun to see the freshmen step up," said O'Grady. "They don't play like freshmen at all. They play really confidently and they fit into the system really well."
Iowa doesn't have to wait long for its next test away from the friendly confines of Carver-Hawkeye Arena either, as a clash with Big 12 foe Kansas awaits in Sioux Falls on Wednesday, November 20. Tipoff is at 6:00 PM CT on the Big Ten Network.
