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Iowa Hawkeyes will be stress-free come Selection Sunday -- College Basketball - ESPN
by John Gasaway
Last season Iowa made the NCAA tournament for the first time in eight years. Barely.
The Hawkeyes lost six of their last seven games heading into Selection Sunday and were handed a spot in the First Four as a No. 11 seed. Coach Fran McCaffery's team promptly lost to Tennessee 78-65 (strange score considering the game went to overtime), and that, as the saying goes, was all she wrote.
In other words it has been a very long time since fans in Iowa City have been able to greet mid-March serene in the knowledge that their team is headed to the NCAA tournament. I expect that to change in 2014-15. Even without former starters Roy Devyn Marble and Melsahn Basabe, this Iowa team should be able to bypass Dayton entirely and proceed directly to the round of 64. I have the Hawkeyes down in my book as a lock.
True, replacing Marble will be no small task. He was McCaffery's leading scorer and a first-team All-Big Ten selection. Still, if any team can spare its featured star, it is surely one with a rotation that went 10-deep, as the Hawkeyes were last season.
When the topic of discussion is about the Big Ten, we tend to think of Bo Ryan and John Beilein as the "system" coaches. Well, McCaffery has a system, too -- he just likes to go a little faster than those guys. Last season, no offense in Big Ten play -- not even Wisconsin's -- could hold a candle to what Michigan was doing, but Iowa was still excellent in its own right in terms of putting points on the board. In fact, McCaffery had statistically the most consistent offense in the league, right alongside the Wolverines.
(Make that statistically the most consistent good offense in Big Ten play. Strictly speaking, Penn State was even more consistent on that side of the ball than the Hawkeyes, but in the case of the Nittany Lions and the league's No. 9-rated offense, that was not necessarily good news.)
Don't be surprised if the Hawkeyes' consistency on that side of the ball continues this season, even without Marble. All teams will suffer cold shooting nights on occasion, of course, but other things being equal, those nights can be less damaging to teams that rely heavily on 2-pointers, offensive rebounds and free throws, the way the Hawkeyes do.
Then again, maybe that's just a glass-half-full phrasing of what could be seen as a somewhat more worrisome fact: Iowa doesn't have a proven medium- to high-volume 3-point shooter. The Hawkeyes played 33 games last season, and there isn't a player on McCaffery's roster who made that many 3s.
If you're of a mind to fret about this offense, perimeter scoring is definitely the direction your worries should carry you. I just happen to think it was a fairly valid worry last season, too (Marble shot a so-so 35 percent on 149 attempts), and Iowa's offense rang up 1.13 points per possession against the Big Ten anyway.
My abiding faith in Iowa's interior-oriented ways starts, reasonably enough, with a career 58 percent 2-point shooter: Aaron White. In each of his past two seasons in Iowa City, White has continued to make shots while somewhat surprisingly playing a progressively smaller role in the offense. This season I anticipate he will continuing making shots, but the workload will register a healthy increase.
White has drawn fouls throughout his career, and he also has improved his free throw shooting to the point where he now connects 81 percent of the time from the line. He's the perfect player for McCaffery's style; the senior just needs to be fed more possessions. (Though giving up on 3s also be in order, seeing as White is just 40-of-158 for his career from out there.)
It will fall to guard Mike Gesell to see to it that the ball ends up in the correct hands. Gesell struggled from the field -- and for that matter, at the line -- as a sophomore last season, but his per-possession assist and turnover rates went in the correct directions (up and down, respectively) and he clearly has the ability to operate efficiently at an accelerated tempo. Whether Gesell is feeding White, Jarrod Uthoff, Josh Oglesby or perhaps Peter Jok, the game plan remains the same. Get a good look quickly, and let Gabriel Olaseni and Adam Woodbury worry about cleaning up the misses.
That approach was working great last season right up until late February, when things began to fall apart. McCaffery has intimated that part of the problem may have been a scheduling crunch created by a freak accident. Iowa had already traveled to Bloomington when the Hawkeyes' Feb. 18 game against Indiana was postponed due to a metal plate falling from the Assembly Hall ceiling six hours before tipoff. The game ended up being played nine days later, and the postponement necessitated an extra trip for McCaffery and his team.
Maybe logistical challenges did indeed play a part in the Hawkeyes' swoon. If so, Iowa should carefully inspect all road arenas' ceilings ahead of time this season, because the defensive collapse recorded by the team was . . . shocking? Historic? Epic? Yes, yes and yes.
In Iowa's last six conference games, Big Ten opponents scored 1.18 points per trip, thanks in large part to 57 percent shooting on their 2s and 43 percent accuracy on 3s. Cite your favorite hapless defense from last season, and in those six games Iowa was even more woeful. Worse than Boston College. Worse than DePaul. Worse than (gulp) TCU.
Suffice it to say that was out of character for McCaffery's teams. We likely won't see that kind of defense from Iowa again anytime soon, and with White and his teammates powering to the basket and crashing the glass, the Hawkeyes are poised to give their fans a relatively stress-free Selection Sunday come March. It's been a long time coming.
by John Gasaway
Last season Iowa made the NCAA tournament for the first time in eight years. Barely.
The Hawkeyes lost six of their last seven games heading into Selection Sunday and were handed a spot in the First Four as a No. 11 seed. Coach Fran McCaffery's team promptly lost to Tennessee 78-65 (strange score considering the game went to overtime), and that, as the saying goes, was all she wrote.
In other words it has been a very long time since fans in Iowa City have been able to greet mid-March serene in the knowledge that their team is headed to the NCAA tournament. I expect that to change in 2014-15. Even without former starters Roy Devyn Marble and Melsahn Basabe, this Iowa team should be able to bypass Dayton entirely and proceed directly to the round of 64. I have the Hawkeyes down in my book as a lock.
True, replacing Marble will be no small task. He was McCaffery's leading scorer and a first-team All-Big Ten selection. Still, if any team can spare its featured star, it is surely one with a rotation that went 10-deep, as the Hawkeyes were last season.
When the topic of discussion is about the Big Ten, we tend to think of Bo Ryan and John Beilein as the "system" coaches. Well, McCaffery has a system, too -- he just likes to go a little faster than those guys. Last season, no offense in Big Ten play -- not even Wisconsin's -- could hold a candle to what Michigan was doing, but Iowa was still excellent in its own right in terms of putting points on the board. In fact, McCaffery had statistically the most consistent offense in the league, right alongside the Wolverines.
(Make that statistically the most consistent good offense in Big Ten play. Strictly speaking, Penn State was even more consistent on that side of the ball than the Hawkeyes, but in the case of the Nittany Lions and the league's No. 9-rated offense, that was not necessarily good news.)
Don't be surprised if the Hawkeyes' consistency on that side of the ball continues this season, even without Marble. All teams will suffer cold shooting nights on occasion, of course, but other things being equal, those nights can be less damaging to teams that rely heavily on 2-pointers, offensive rebounds and free throws, the way the Hawkeyes do.
Then again, maybe that's just a glass-half-full phrasing of what could be seen as a somewhat more worrisome fact: Iowa doesn't have a proven medium- to high-volume 3-point shooter. The Hawkeyes played 33 games last season, and there isn't a player on McCaffery's roster who made that many 3s.
If you're of a mind to fret about this offense, perimeter scoring is definitely the direction your worries should carry you. I just happen to think it was a fairly valid worry last season, too (Marble shot a so-so 35 percent on 149 attempts), and Iowa's offense rang up 1.13 points per possession against the Big Ten anyway.
My abiding faith in Iowa's interior-oriented ways starts, reasonably enough, with a career 58 percent 2-point shooter: Aaron White. In each of his past two seasons in Iowa City, White has continued to make shots while somewhat surprisingly playing a progressively smaller role in the offense. This season I anticipate he will continuing making shots, but the workload will register a healthy increase.
White has drawn fouls throughout his career, and he also has improved his free throw shooting to the point where he now connects 81 percent of the time from the line. He's the perfect player for McCaffery's style; the senior just needs to be fed more possessions. (Though giving up on 3s also be in order, seeing as White is just 40-of-158 for his career from out there.)
It will fall to guard Mike Gesell to see to it that the ball ends up in the correct hands. Gesell struggled from the field -- and for that matter, at the line -- as a sophomore last season, but his per-possession assist and turnover rates went in the correct directions (up and down, respectively) and he clearly has the ability to operate efficiently at an accelerated tempo. Whether Gesell is feeding White, Jarrod Uthoff, Josh Oglesby or perhaps Peter Jok, the game plan remains the same. Get a good look quickly, and let Gabriel Olaseni and Adam Woodbury worry about cleaning up the misses.
That approach was working great last season right up until late February, when things began to fall apart. McCaffery has intimated that part of the problem may have been a scheduling crunch created by a freak accident. Iowa had already traveled to Bloomington when the Hawkeyes' Feb. 18 game against Indiana was postponed due to a metal plate falling from the Assembly Hall ceiling six hours before tipoff. The game ended up being played nine days later, and the postponement necessitated an extra trip for McCaffery and his team.
Maybe logistical challenges did indeed play a part in the Hawkeyes' swoon. If so, Iowa should carefully inspect all road arenas' ceilings ahead of time this season, because the defensive collapse recorded by the team was . . . shocking? Historic? Epic? Yes, yes and yes.
In Iowa's last six conference games, Big Ten opponents scored 1.18 points per trip, thanks in large part to 57 percent shooting on their 2s and 43 percent accuracy on 3s. Cite your favorite hapless defense from last season, and in those six games Iowa was even more woeful. Worse than Boston College. Worse than DePaul. Worse than (gulp) TCU.
Suffice it to say that was out of character for McCaffery's teams. We likely won't see that kind of defense from Iowa again anytime soon, and with White and his teammates powering to the basket and crashing the glass, the Hawkeyes are poised to give their fans a relatively stress-free Selection Sunday come March. It's been a long time coming.
