Early in the second half of Iowa men’s basketball’s Sunday afternoon matchup versus No. 24 Wisconsin, head coach Ben McCollum frustratingly gestured the “T” signal with his hands towards the nearest official, tossed his clipboard on the floor in the team huddle, and passionately scribbled words with an Expo marker.
The timeout came after Tate Sage made a contested layup to cut the Badger lead down to 61-57 with 10:21 to go. It was one of the many Hawkeye buckets in a long-awaited efficient offensive outing. But in McCollum’s mind, what’s good about made shots if his team can’t get defensive stops on the other end?
“Obviously, credit to Wisconsin. I thought they did a good job offensively,” said Iowa head coach Ben McCollum. “I didn’t think we did a very good job defensively. Honestly, I thought we were really poor at executing a lot of the stuff.”
In the first half, Iowa shot 56 percent from the field, making 14 of its 25 shot attempts including 5-of-11 from three-point land and nine assists. Despite that, Iowa only led by one, 41-40, at halftime, in-large part due to Wisconsin hitting 54 percent of its shots.
And in the second half, the Badgers stole the lead at the 17:40 mark and never gave it back up. It was a three-point game, 66-63, with 6:52 remaining before Wisconsin hit five-straight shots, four of which were unanswered for over four minutes, leading to the 84-71 result in Wisconsin’s favor.
But it was the way in which it happened that stuck out. Its guards drove at-will all over the Iowa defense, whether it was on the fast break or in the half court, as well as several unchecked backdoor opportunities, resulting in the Badgers’ 18-of-28 shooting inside the arc.
“I feel like there’s definitely a couple things down the stretch, transition, stopping [Wisconsin guard Nick Boyd] in transition, the game would have been turned around,” Iowa guard Tate Sage said. “I just felt like it was more of our defensive strategy that we didn’t execute good enough that gave them chances.”
Boyd exploited the Hawkeye defense for a near-triple-double of 27 points, 10 assists, and nine rebounds. He was just one of three Badger players to score over their season average – Walter Nolan’s 18 points surpassing his 13.6 average, and Austin Rapp’s 14 points surpassing his 9.3 average. John Blackwell averages 18.8 points and finished with 13 points, however, most of those points came in Wisconsin’s late runaway.
Iowa came off a win where it shot 33 percent against No. 9 Nebraska on Tuesday and still came out with the victory because of its defense. Five days later, the Hawkeyes shot over 50 percent for majority of the game against Wisconsin and failed to come out on top because of its defense.
Two games, five days, and a complete 180-degree result.
“[It’s] very frustrating because if you play super well on offense and you play horrible defense, that’s the result you get,” Iowa guard Bennett Stirtz said. “So we need to play on both sides of the ball. And it’s just a reminder that playing well on offense [alone] is not going to win a Big Ten game, especially on the road.”