By Blake Dowson
No one can definitively say how many wins in the Big Ten Tournament the Iowa men’s basketball team needs to secure a spot in the NCAA Tournament in the coming weeks.
It could take one, if a bunch of other bubble teams lose early in their conference tournaments. Two seems more realistic, and three wins would make Iowa’s argument pretty strong to get in.
Head coach Fran McCaffery doesn’t know how many it will take, and frankly, he doesn’t care. Neither do his players. His star senior, Peter Jok, said Tuesday the only thing that matters in March is winning the game in front of them. The thing Jok said he does know, for sure, is that he’s feeling an awful lot better about his team heading into this year’s Big Ten Tournament than in years past.
“The last few years, at the end of the season, we’ve been down and not playing well,” he said. “It’s the opposite this year. We went through a lot of struggles, but right now, we’re clicking, so I think that’s the difference between this year and the last few years I’ve been here.”
The last few years he’s been here, the team has collapsed when the calendar turned to March.
In 2016, the Jarrod Uthoff-led Hawkeyes were 20-5 at one time, with four wins over Purdue and Michigan State and a top-five ranking. When March rolled around, the team was 22-11 and was bounced in the second round of the NCAA Tournament as a No. 7-seed.
2014 was much of the same — a top-10 Iowa team that was once 19-6 finished 20-13, losing an NCAA Tournament play-in game.
Those teams were led by upperclassmen. First-year players dominate this year’s team. But somehow, the team is overflowing with confidence and is fully expecting to handle their business in Washington, D.C., this weekend.
Much of that comes from the four-game winning streak the team is on.
“Winning will bring you confidence. We’re on a four-game winning streak here,” Nicholas Baer said. “That’ll bring you confidence. Also, when we have guys playing at a very high level; Jordan [Bohannon] has been playing really well lately, knocking down shots. Tyler [Cook] has been effective in the low post, and Cordell [Pemsl] coming off the bench has been really impactful for us.”
While meeting with the media on Tuesday, the Iowa players were asked about their first do-or-die games of the season.
The reality, though, as each of them put it, is that they’ve been playing do-or-die games since they lost to Illinois at home to move their overall record to 14-13 and conference record to 6-8.
“In a lot of ways, it’s been do-or-die for a while now, understanding where we’ve been after that [second] Illinois loss,” Baer said. “We kind of had that mindset that every game that we play next is our biggest game. As that translates to the Big Ten Tournament, just continuing that mindset, and it’s been successful for us recently.”
As for McCaffery, he doesn’t really read into the struggles his teams have faced in the Big Ten Tournament recently. There’s no big institutional reason his teams have been beat in three-straight opening-round games. Sometimes, teams just don’t play well. Sometimes you run into a team that has been on a roll lately.
For once, Iowa is that team in the tournament that no one wants to be matched up against.
“I don’t overstate it, I don’t understate it. Everybody knows what’s at stake,” McCaffery said. “Everybody knows where we sit and what opportunities are out there for this team. You don’t have to remind them and hit them in the face with it every minute.”