Tough finale, but Iowa's players are excited for basketball future

INDIANAPOLIS - Eric May sat devastated in his locker and struggled to come to grips about the final 10 minutes of his team's final game this season.

May didn't want to talk about his thunderous dunk over Michigan State's Draymond Green and successive 3-point play that put Iowa up by seven points with 11:40 left. May, a sophomore, instead talked big picture, about how he missed a 3-point attempt that could have taken the lead to 10 points. He talked about how he let the team down in a 66-61 loss Thursday in the Big Ten Tournament's opening round.

“We invested a lot of time this year,” May said. “We felt like we really had them, and we just made some plays that let it go. That's what's really frustrating.

“It's hard ... but you've got to move forward.”

Iowa finished the season 11-20 overall, the second-most losses in school history. There were the traditional double-digit losses at Purdue, Ohio State, Michigan State and Illinois. But in comparison with the previous season - which contained 22 losses and historic losses to Wisconsin, Purdue and Minnesota - there's really no comparison. In its last six Big Ten home games, Iowa finished 3-3 with wins over Purdue, Michigan State and Indiana. Two of the losses were in overtime. Iowa lost seven games this year by five points or less.

The competitiveness within the Big Ten has May and his teammates optimistic and excited about their future.

“Our record doesn't indicate how we've competed,” Iowa junior guard Bryce Cartwright. “But we have. Maybe if a couple of things go our way, we're 17-13 and have some type of postseason. We just have to take it for what it is and get better. Use it as fuel for next year.”

Turmoil has been the constant within the program since 2007, when Steve Alford left Iowa for New Mexico. Todd Lickliter went 38-58 and lost nine scholarship players to transfer in three seasons before he was fired last March. Iowa Athletics Director Gary Barta replaced Lickliter with Fran McCaffery, who promised to bring an up-tempo style of offense. McCaffery immediately suffered through the transfer of leading rebounder Aaron Fuller to USC and the loss of two recruits to other Division I programs.

But McCaffery rebounded and brought two players to Iowa who ended the season as the team's only league-honored players, Cartwright, a late junior-college recruit, replaced an injured Cully Payne at point guard and averaged league-high 6.83 assists a game in Big Ten play. Freshman Melsahn Basabe, an original signee for McCaffery at Siena, had five games of 20 or more points and was named to the Big Ten's all-freshman team.

McCaffery also massaged some bruised egos of Iowa's holdovers. Junior Matt Gatens cut his turnovers in half from his sophomore year, increased his scoring average to a team-high 12.6 points and led the Big Ten in free-throw percentage. Junior Andrew Brommer played 388 minutes this year, more than double his previous two seasons. He also scored 96 points, while combining for 61 in his first two years.

“I think morale right now is really high and all of us are pumped about the things to come,” Brommer said. “We're all going to work extremely hard this off-season to get better and make a splash next year in the Big Ten.”

Iowa returns all but one player - senior post Jarryd Cole, a three-year captain. Payne, who started every game at point guard as a freshman, also is set to return as a red-shirt sophomore. Iowa has signed two players - Cedar Rapids Washington shooting guard Josh Oglesby and Strongsville (Ohio) forward Aaron White - and has two more scholarships to give this spring.

The improvement is nice for McCaffery, as is the return of all but one players. But McCaffery, who took Siena to three straight NCAA Tournaments before coming to Iowa, judges the program's future solely on the bottom line.

“As the season went on our defense improved, our rebounding improved, our offense picked up the tempo, and individual players got better,” McCaffery said. “Individual players developed confidence and played better. So now we're in a position where we're winning some games, we're right in games against really good teams. So the next step has to be getting over the hump to win those games on a regular basis.”