A Lucy Olsen mid-range shot glanced off iron in the waning seconds of Iowa's trip to East Lansing, and Michigan State beat the Hawkeyes 68-66 in a matinee thriller on Sunday. Iowa falls to 9-2 on the year, and starts its Big Ten slate 0-1 for the first time since 2019-20.
Hannah Stuelke led the Hawkeyes with 18 points and eight rebounds, while Olsen added 13 on 4-for-17 shooting.
THE DEEP THREE
1. Turnovers, turnovers, turnovers. Iowa's 66 points on offense were not only a season low, they marked the seventh-straight game where Iowa was held to 75 points or fewer, a jarring stat for an offensive guru like head coach Jan Jensen but also not that much of a surprise as the team continues to break in its reupholstered roster on the fly.
This game was the Hawkeyes' to win, too: they led by nine twice in the second half, including after a pair of Kylie Feuerbach triples to start the fourth quarter, but an ensuing 14-0 run by the Spartans lurched the lead back into their hands — permanently, as it would turn out.
Instead, the Hawkeyes let their leads — and the win — slip away as readily as they did with possession, as six of their 23 turnovers happened in the dreaded final frame, with Sparty converting seven points off them.
Olsen's seven giveaways "led" the Hawkeyes, while Kylie Feuerbach had five. Altogether, the Spartans "only" had 14 points off Iowa's turnovers, but even with a sparse 0.61 points scored per turnover, that's still 23 possessions ending with a giveaway instead of a chance to score.
The Spartans' inability to score more off Iowa's turnovers certainly speaks highly of the Hawkeyes' ability to get back in transition and not let bad plays beat them twice, as the saying goes, but it also speaks to a somewhat unexpected detail of Iowa's futility Sunday: it was less a factor of Michigan State's press, which would have been creating live-ball turnovers with lots of space for creating in transition, and more a lack of execution in the halfcourt set (though the press factors into that too).
Indeed, only nine of Iowa's 23 turnovers were steals by the Spartans, so any fears that this team would dissolve into a "can't get the ball across halfcourt" frenetic mess against the Big Ten seem to have been assuaged. Even as a 4/5, Stuelke looked comfortable navigating the press with and without the ball in her hands, and Syd Affolter was an asset against pressure as well.
Even with an uncommonly tight whistle on travels and other violations though, fourteen dead-ball turnovers is a recipe for disaster on the road on the Big Ten, as if the Hawkeyes or anyone else still needed to learn that lesson.
Addison O'Grady's early-season dominance doesn't look like a mirage per se, but Jensen will likely draw back the talk of O'Grady having Czinano or Gustafson-sized expectations for a while. Iowa's center excels in halfcourt situations with well-placed entry passes, especially if the defense isn't doubling from the weak side on the entry pass, but as opposing teams speed up Iowa's offense with the press it looks like O'Grady's limitations from the Caitlin Clark-centric offense are starting to crop up again.
O'Grady was only charged with one turnover in the loss, but she had multiple passes and rebounding opportunities bounce off her fingertips. In a two-point loss with nearly two dozen turnovers, those hiccups become magnified in importance.
Of course, passes have to come from teammates, and Iowa fans who got used to Clark's pinpoint dimes are having to rediscover what mere mortals pass like at the collegiate level: some great, some better than others, but a whole lot of holding one's breath while the ball's in the air no matter what.
While O'Grady only contributed four points, she had some solid contributions as a rebounder and rim protector; the word "liability" should probably be retired as a relic of her underclassman career in Iowa City. Iowa did go eight minutes without her or Ava Heiden on the floor, though, and outscored the Spartans by two in those minutes.
It's good to have the versatility of multiple clutch-time lineups, but to bastardize a football aphorism: if you have multiple best fives, do you really have any?
2. There's no "I" in defense, either. The fourth quarter belonged to Michigan State guard Nyla Hampton, who scored 13 of the team's 19 points in the final frame (all 13 of her points for the game, in fact) as Michigan State ran off a 14-0 spree to take control of the game.
While Feuerbach gamely held her own on defense, Michigan State didn't encounter too much difficulty generating open looks for Hampton to drive in the screen-and-roll game, and all of a sudden Iowa's stout perimeter defense was barely an inconvenience for the senior guard.
Defending the pick-and-roll is perhaps the sport's best example of "easier said than done" — there are pro teams, men and women, who routinely struggle with the task — but Iowa's struggles with how to address the screens, plus some (earned) fear of leaving Julia Ayrault open, as she led all scorers with 19 in the win, meant that opposing teams who were already salivating at Iowa's turnover numbers also have the outline of how to attack the heretofore stout defense: screen, attack and crash the offensive glass.
Case in point: the Spartans' 17-6 advantage in second-half points easily accounted for the winning margin.
3. The world is not in fact ending. Iowa just played the Nos. 17, 18 and 19 teams in the current AP Poll in consecutive games, and went 1-2 in the stretch — the losses to Tennessee and Michigan State both went down to the wire, while the win over ISU was similarly tooth-and-talon to the end. That's three competitive games in three opportunities against three teams who have a realistic shot at hosting an NCAA Tournament sub-regional come March.
Iowa doesn't need to traffic in moral victories, not for the least of reasons being that there's no column for those in the standings, but for a team that is still developing its five-player chemistry among its best lineups, these close losses should be significantly more encouraging than if MSU had blitzed the Hawkeyes by 40.
Lucy Olsen shot 1-for-9 from 2-point range and Iowa lost by two. That's unlikely to happen again, for a lot of reasons. With Iowa's dearth of iso playmakers around her, the offense depends on Olsen continuing to trust that shot, even on days like Sunday.
The load does lighten a touch for Iowa, if only through New Year's; UNI comes to town this coming week before the Big Ten season resumes against Purdue and Penn State, neither of whom are projected as NCAA Tournament teams. That's a strong opportunity to shore up the persistent ball-control woes, especially as they persist in half-court sets.
That game against UNI tips off at 6:30 PM on Friday, December 20; coverage is streaming only, unfortunately: on Big Ten Plus, albeit for the last time this season.
