A common theme for the Iowa basketball team continued on Saturday as the Hawkeyes fell below .500 for the season after a loss at Penn State. Fran McCaffery discusses his team falling behind and not moving the ball, which led to a halftime deficit that his club was never able to recover from. McCaffery discusses what he saw on Saturday from his team and seeing future Hawkeye Joe Wieskamp go for 54 points on Friday night.
Q: What did you see out there from your team tonight?
McCAFFERY: I thought we started out the game ok. They made a little run and we got it to 14-14 and then I didn’t think we responded the way we needed to. Sometimes we have a tendency to go one on one in those situations, which doesn’t work for us. We have to move it, especially with Bohannon struggled because he was sick. He tried to go and this team puts a lot of pressure on you at the point of attack, which is all the more reason that we have to get it moving.
We went one on one during a stretch where we were struggling offensively and they were scoring. They shared the ball and got their break going a little bit. When it gets to 9 or 10, you have to get it to 5. It can’t go from 10 to 18 that quickly.
At the start the second half, we got some stops and played pretty well defensively, but we went 2-13 in that stretch. We had some good looks at it. They are a team that challenges you at the rim pretty well, so we had some misses that maybe, especially Luka, who had it there a couple of times and didn’t finish. But, we got into the bonus pretty quickly by driving the ball and throwing it inside, but we were missing some free throws. As a result, we couldn’t really make more than a mini run when we cut it to 13 or something like that.
Q: What do you attribute the three point shooting issues tonight to?
McCAFFERY: Bohannon is usually a guy who is going to make three’s for us. He made his first one at the start of the game, but he ran out of gas pretty quickly. Isaiah had some good looks. Luka had some good looks. Guys that typically trust to take those shots like Baer. They are a good defensive team. They are long and active. They close quickly, so they put some pressure on us and we just couldn’t get anyone going.
Q: What are the significant differences you see between Penn State now and when you saw them in December?
McCAFFERY: I just think they are further along in their development. You have some really good players. The big three are really the guys that you have to prepare for. In Carr, Watkins, and Stevens, you know those guys are good, but I think Reaves is very underrated. He is effective on both ends of the floor. Then they have Garner, who came into the game with 68 three’s this year. I think Bohannon had made 69, so they are the two leaders in our league. They have different weapons that make them hard to guard. They defend and share the ball pretty good. I don’t see a lot of selfishness there with a lot of guys with reps and sometimes you don’t see that. You see guys going for their own and I don’t see that with this team. That is a level of maturity that you would expect over time to develop. All in all, they are a better team than they were.
Q: You haven’t had many teams under .500 this late in the season. What is your message to your team at this point in the year?
McCAFFERY: It’s no different than if we were 8 games over .500. It’s no different. Had we won tonight, you can’t get too excited about it. You have to break it down and say this is what we did well and this is what we have to work on. Then we have the next game and it’s Michigan State, ok, and we have to do this, this, and this and you have to keep grinding. You can’t get too high or too low. We will keep drilling them. We will keep showing them film. We will show them the positives and the negatives. For the most part, I will stay positive with the guys because when you do fall below .500 at this time of the season, it is easy to go negative and start blaming. I have said this before, if you do that, you aren’t going to get anything.
I thought tonight Tyler Cook was really good. He didn’t start the game well, but I am really proud of the way he came back in the second half. Same thing with Luka. I thought he really couldn’t get going the way he has, but he kept grinding. Same thing with Nunge. Those are two freshmen that I think have great promise. Maishe Dailey is trying to learn a new position and he’s battling. I thought he gave us a big boost in the first half, especially defensively because they have some big perimeter guys. So there are positives there even though we got beat by 20 plus.
Q: You usually come with the team to road games, but you stayed behind to watch a top recruit. Is that rare for you? Obviously he had a great game and can you talk about Joe Wieskamp’s game?
McCAFFERY: Yeah, I can talk about Joe, but I can’t talk about the other guy. I have never recruited a guy who scored more points than the other team, so that was pretty impressive. He scored all of his teams points in the first half. He had 54, so that was pretty impressive. I have been watching him since he was in 5th grade, so I’m not surprised. I am excited that he’s coming to play for us.
I have done this before. I have gone recruiting, which a lot of us do. We practiced, met, and had a film session before we left, so the only thing I missed was one film session last night that the scouting coach ran.
