Hilton’s good old days more distant than ever

AMES - Ahhh, young people, you should have seen Hilton Coliseum back in the day.

Everyone in the Big 12 Conference, and the Big 8 before it, feared the place. Iowa State had decent men's basketball teams, sometimes really good ones. But when the Cyclones played at home? They could beat anybody.

Even Kansas? The national-power, tradition-rich Kansas Jayhawks? Larry Brown's KU teams of the 1980s went 0-5 here. Two of those teams went to the Final Four. One won a national title.

Roy Williams, one of the college game's coaching gods of the last quarter-century, took Kansas teams to Ames 15 times. They lost seven.

But the Jayhawks ran their record against Greg McDermott-coached ISU clubs to 7-0 Saturday in Hilton with an 84-61 thrashing of the Cyclones. The statistic of the game may be the Jayhawks using nine players in the first five minutes when McDermott had just eight to call on, period.

The Cyclones weren't going to win this with guard Lucca Staiger still on the team instead of having fled to play pro ball in Germany in the dead of an Iowa winter. They weren't going to win even had key front-line reserves Jamie Vanderbeken and Charles Boozer not been lost for the season with injuries.

But you play just eight guys against a deep, dangerous team like third-ranked, 18-1 Kansas, and you're taking the proverbial knife to a gunfight.

“Nobody's going to feel sorry for us,” McDermott said. “We've got eight guys the rest of the way and there's no chance of that changing. It's what we have right now. We've got to find our way above that.”

Maybe you can rise up against the Nebraskas and Colorados. But eight probably isn't enough against the upper half of the Big 12, the nation's best men's basketball league.

“The easy thing to do is use it as an excuse, and I'm not going to allow that to happen,” McDermott said.

He may not, but you can't blame ISU power forward Craig Brackins if he does. Kansas double-teamed him everywhere he went as he labored to 13 points, a year after he torched the Jayhawks here for 42 (in a 15-point defeat).

“It's a frustrating way to play the game,” McDermott said, “but that's the part he's going to have to deal with. There's more of that to come, I'm pretty sure.”

Sophomore center Justin Hamilton plays hard and has major-college skills, but he and backup LeRon Dendy aren't potent enough offensively to open things up for Brackins. And when Brackins sent the ball back outside Saturday, as he often had to, little good came from it.

Insert Brackins in Kansas' lineup, and he'd probably be getting All-America talk right now like ex-Cyclone forward Wesley Johnson is getting with Syracuse.

Johnson is two seasons removed from this program but still symbolizes the McDermott era here.

First, eventual NBA player Mike Taylor was kicked off the team because of his legal issues. The next year, Johnson checked out. Now off goes Staiger. He was no All-America, but he averaged three 3-pointers a game, opening things up a wee bit for Brackins.

What will it take for ISU to get back to being able to bump off Kansas once in a while? Besides, you know, more talent?

“We have to play more consistently than we did today,” McDermott said. “I think it takes a little luck as well. Luck hasn't exactly been on our side this week.”

Kansas, meanwhile, leaves nothing to chance. Bill Self keeps sweeping up prep superstars from across the nation, guys who can win anywhere. Even Hilton.