Iowa gets 'immeasurable' win without Peter Jok

IOWA CITY — No Peter Jok, no problem.

OK, let's not get too carried away, but still: the Iowa men's basketball team got an 85-72 win against Ohio State on Saturday night, and got it in a complete and decisive way. The Hawkeyes had fallen down, 8-0, 8-0 and 10-0 to start their previous three games. A much quicker, more efficient start let Iowa play much more stress-free.

Without their best player, nine underclassmen and one junior wore down a Buckeyes (13-9, 3-6 Big Ten) team that had won three of four coming in. Without their best player, the Hawkeyes turned previously-stagnant offense into active, side-to-side ball movement.

The Hawkeyes (11-10, 4-5) are not better without Peter Jok, but maybe not having him for one night thanks to a back injury was enough to remind them why they've been so confident in themselves from the start.

'I think (this performance) it's sort of immeasurable,' Coach Fran McCaffery said. 'What you saw was just a lot more aggressiveness from other people, and that's what I want them to be. I want them to be aggressive.

'If you move the ball, you're shooting more open shots. I felt we recognized switching, got the ball inside, got in the bonus early, we ran a little bit better, I thought. I have a lot of respect for this team, for this program, for (Ohio State Coach) Thad (Matta), and for us to defend the way we did and for us to execute the way we did I think is a big step for our program.'

Returning home helped, to be certain, but Iowa had a different look about it all night — a look it didn't have even in the last home game against Maryland.

When asked, each of the players cited that quick start as a big reason for the looser, less in-your-head kind of play that usually leads to a successful night. The Hawkeyes didn't second-guess themselves. They didn't 'tighten up' as forward Nicholas Baer put it.

Four players finished in double figures, led by Brady Ellingson, whose 5 of 7 shooting night from 3-point range gave him a game-high 17 points. Ryan Kriener added 14 points and seven rebounds, Tyler Cook had 13 points and Jordan Bohannon added 12 on 4 of 10 shooting from deep. Dom Uhl had six points, six assists and five rebounds off the bench. Iowa got 44 points total from its bench, and only turned it over nine times all night — just three in the second half.

Mentally and physically, it was a departure from what seemed to drag them down in the three losses before Saturday night.

Cook said, 'one of the things the coaches told us was to come out and play naturally and just be ballers and not robots,' and that the Hawkeyes 'played off our instincts and didn't think as much, and that helped us tonight.'

'We try to get them to have fun, you know, and it can be very businesslike when you get into conference play and you're dealing with scouting reports and you're dealing with the road, and there's a lot of stress because you've got a group of kids that want to do what you ask them to do,' McCaffery said. 'None of those guys are fighting us. They want to be successful. They want to make the right decision. They want to be a good teammate. And sometimes it doesn't come together. We've had a couple of those games on the road where it didn't come together.

'And so what we try to do was get them to say, hey, guys, this has to be fun. Yeah, it's work. Yeah, we're going to grind. But go have fun.'

Fun, it was, and at a much-needed time for Iowa.

McCaffery described Jok's status as 'day-to-day' while dealing with his back issue, and said it's entirely up to the medical staff when the West Des Moines native returns.

When he does, the team knows they'll still look to him as they did before. Baer, who had six points and eight rebounds, said when he returns, 'mixing some of our actions up a little bit' will help keep the flow they had Saturday. Cook pointed out this team's intelligence, adding, 'we've got a lot of smart guys on the team. Pete obviously is really smart and has been through this. Him seeing the ball movement, us remembering the ball movement — adding him back in is only going to be a help for us.'

Iowa is not better without Peter Jok. Saturday night they did well, but the Hawkeyes are confident what happened against the Buckeyes will just be bolstered by their leader's return.

'I just think you have a team of individuals now that are supremely confident, and they'll absorb him well. They respect who he is, what he does, and I think he respects who they are and what they do. He'll come back in and he'll move it,' McCaffery said. 'I think he's done a pretty good job of trying to be a screener and trying to move the ball and be unselfish, and there's times when he's just got to do what he does and get buckets and get them in bunches, and that's what the good teams have. Other people step up, and then sometimes he'll go off, and that's what we need.'

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