Hlas column: Hawkeyes still need to go to finishing school

IOWA CITY - Sometime in the future, the pieces will come together and hearts will break less frequently.

But this is Iowa men's basketball now: The players can't finish off games.

The shots won't in late in second-halves and late in overtimes. That has separated a million also-rans from a million winners.

Even when Iowa finished off a first-half in as memorable a way as a team can, it didn't count. Bryce Cartwright banked in a 55-foot shot at the buzzer to end the first-half of Saturday's game against Michigan, giving the Hawkeyes a 35-24 lead.

Cartwright ran off the court grinning. So did his teammates. A crowd of 13,835 in Carver-Hawkeye Arena (people like Saturday afternoon games, Big Ten) was standing and smiling.

But the shot was reviewed. Long after the Hawkeyes were in their dressing room, the three points were negated by official Ed Hightower. The ball was barely touching Cartwright's fingertips as the game clock had struck zero.

Iowa was on the wrong side of the last tenth-of-a-second.

“The fans' reaction,” Cartwright said, when asked when he learned his longest shot didn't count. “I heard them in the locker room, so I had a hint. It must have been conclusive ‘cause the dude ruled it a three.”

The dude ruled right. The shot was good, but it wasn't.

The look was good, but the shot wasn't when Cartwright couldn't make the bank he put up off a knife to the basket in the final seconds of the second half to prevent the game from going to overtime. The looks were good but the shots weren't when Zach McCabe and Cartwright missed 3-pointers in the last five seconds of overtime, and Michigan got away with a 75-72 win.

That's three 3-point losses for Iowa in their last four games, two of them in overtime. There are reasons this team is in last-place in the Big Ten at 3-12. One big one is that it just can't close.

Three times in four games you have a chance to tie or win at the end of regulation. Three times, you just watch the other team celebrate.

“It definitely gets discouraging,” Iowa guard Matt Gatens said, “and it kills to put in so much hard work going in and during the game and you don't have anything to show for it. Hopefully, you learn from it and grow.”

If anything, the Hawkeyes have learned to take a verbal lashing from their coach without going into shells.

After Michigan scored a pair of consecutive baskets partly thanks to sloppy Iowa play on offense and defense, Iowa Coach Fran McCaffery called time with his team down 44-42 with 8:36 left.

“Wake up!” he yelled at Gatens, who slipped, and had a turnover and a foul just before the stoppage. “Stay on your gosh-darn feet!”

OK, he didn't say “gosh-darn.”

The coach backed away from the sideline, then quickly returned to holler at the whole team. Then he backed away again, but quickly returned to holler at the whole team. And did the same all over again.

You might say McCaffery took the team's advertising slogan of getting mad again to a new level.

“It's interesting,” McCaffery said, “because what they do is when I get into them, they respond. And sometimes you have teams that you get into and it makes them worse. So you gotta know your team, and this team I felt needed me to get into them, and they played better.”

Just not well enough to win.

You see Michigan with freshman guard Tim Hardaway Jr. (30 points Saturday) and freshman center Jordan Morgan (18 points) and sophomore guard Darius Morris (20 points, 9 assists), and you see a team still has growing pains now but should be really good next season.

But how does Iowa go from being pesky basement-dwellers to a potent first-division outfit?

“It's not that far,” McCaffery insisted. “We are right there. I've said that from the beginning.

“We're right there. We've got a lot of people back. We've got some good players coming, and we'll be fine.”

Bring in players like Morris and Hardaway, and that getting mad stuff will become a memory.