By Blake dowson
This Iowa basketball season has been more up and down than the pace head coach Fran McCaffery likes his teams to play.
This season has been more up and down than a Peter Jok jump shot.
There have been moments of hope, such as the home win over No. 17 Purdue. Then the lows, such as the recent loss to Northwestern on the road, in which plenty of Jok jumpers went up but hardly any went down.
“It was a tough loss, but you can’t let it linger,” Jok said in a release after the 89-54 loss to the Wildcats. “You have to move on. Every game is tough; we have to learn from it, watch film, and focus on Maryland.”
If you can pin anything down about this season thus far, it’s that Iowa plays its best basketball in Carver-Hawkeye. That’s where they will be tonight when they take on the Terrapins (16-2, 4-1 Big Ten).
Given the average age of the guys getting minutes for McCaffery (he’s employed the youngest starting lineup in program history this season with four freshmen), there’s a sense that it was to be expected.
McCaffery said on Tuesday that with his team’s youth, this season has been as much about proving to his own players they belong as it is scouting for other teams.
The one constant throughout the season has been Jok, who has scored at a healthy 21.9 point per game clip. That, along with the momentum Iowa had after the Purdue game, changed when the Hawkeyes traveled to Evanston on Sunday. Jok scored 4 points in the 89-54 loss to the Wildcats, a season low.
The lone senior starter for Iowa has been keyed on all year, but it had yet to matter. When Jok gets a shot up, there’s a good chance it’s going in. The problem against Northwestern was he only got nine shots.
The thing to watch against Maryland tonight will be to see if Northwestern designed the blueprint on how to stop the conference’s leading scorer, or if the Wildcats simply dodged a bullet.
The special treatment Jok is receiving by opposing defenses isn’t anything new to McCaffery, the head coach pointed out.
“The reality is this; they did it to [Matt] Gatens, they did it to [Devyn] Marble,” McCaffery said. “Everybody does it to the other team’s best player. That’s what happens. He’s no different than anybody else. He’s a tough guy. I’m not worried about that.”
Maryland resembles Iowa in the fact it gets much of its production from one upperclassman (Melo Trimble) and a number of freshmen after that. Justin Jackson and Anthony Cowan are both double-digit scorers for the Terrapins, and both are in their first year in College Park.
But as with Jok for Iowa, it starts and ends with Trimble for Maryland.
“He’s got an incredible burst. He’s got the ability to play upright and still go by you, which is rare,” McCaffery said. “So you’d think he’s not going to go, and then he goes, and that will draw some fouls.”
Iowa freshman Jordan Bohannon, who will be tasked with guarding Trimble for much of the game, said it comes down to effort in stopping him and the Terrapins.
“We know what we’re capable of doing, we just have to do it,” Bohannon said in a release. “It’s a lot easier to say it than to go out and do it, but we are capable of winning the [big] games. At the end of the day, it comes down to the effort we give and how much we feed off each other.”
