Hawkeyes learn a lot about their ‘fight’ in Florida trip

IOWA CITY — This point of the college basketball season is a lot about discovery.

Teams are developing rotations, identities on offense and defense and are adapting to new freedom of movement rules that have officials calling a much tighter game. So far in this young season, the Iowa men's basketball team has learned quite a bit in a short amount of time.

From what this team will excel at to how deep into his bench Coach Fran McCaffery wants to go, the Advocare Invitational over the Thanksgiving holiday weekend went a long way toward bringing them some answers.

'I thought we could kind of get out of Brady Ellingson what we got, and we did. Dale Jones gave us some quality minutes. I thought we could get that. I still think Dom Uhl has been solid,' McCaffery said at his weekly news conference on Monday. 'It's hard — when you get into those kinds of games, it's hard to play 12 guys. It's almost impossible. You walk down, and you want to get some of those guys in there to get experience and bring them along to try to win the game, and we do have four seniors and five really experienced players, and that's who you're going to play. That's who I'm going to play. There's not that many minutes left this year for a lot of guys.'

Iowa (4-2) got a mixed bag in terms of results in the trip to Florida, but even in losses to Dayton (82-77) and No. 17 Notre Dame (68-62), the Hawkeyes showed a toughness their head coach wanted to see.

McCaffery said Monday he was 'proud of our fight' and saw a turnaround defensively from the Dayton game to the Notre Dame game and culminated in a stifling effort against No. 20 Wichita State, who was without point guard Fred Van Vleet.

'We have a lot of fight in us, that's for sure,' said Jarrod Uthoff, who leads Iowa with 18.2 points per game. 'We got down a lot to Dayton, we came back. We got down a lot to Notre Dame, we came back. That third day we played a great Wichita State team and really fought and went after them.'

In addition to the usual suspects of Uthoff, Adam Woodbury, Mike Gesell and Peter Jok, McCaffery also pointed to performances of Nicholas Baer, Andrew Fleming, Christian Williams, Ellingson, Jones and Uhl as reasons why the depth Iowa has showed up as a good problem over the course of the games in Orlando.

With so many guys to choose from who could be productive, it becomes hard for a coaching staff to get a feel for what they have on a given night. McCaffery said it most often comes down to what an individual game dictates for player usage in the second half, but that he has to be wary of long-term effects as well.

'You get into the second half with media timeouts and you're in a tight game, you can play seven if you really want to play seven, six, as long as you take your timeouts strategically, because they're going to take some, some media timeouts, free throws,' McCaffery said. 'You're only talking about 20 minutes with however many stops. They're 20 years old. They should be able to handle that, I think.

'Over the course of 40 minutes, over the course of an entire season, you've got to get your guys some rest, and you've got to make sure you pace it so that you're not killing those guys with so many minutes that they're dead by the time you get to Feb. 1.'

Other than the starters, there's no set lineup or rotation yet for McCaffery, who wants to make a game plan for each opponent and use his bench in unique ways each time out.

If that's to expand against Florida State on Wednesday night at Carver-Hawkeye Arena, it will be because he saw something in practice. The learning never stops, after all.

'It's sort of ongoing. It never stops, like, OK, we made a decision. You never really make a decision. You want to continue to give guys an opportunity,' McCaffery said. 'I chose this weekend in particular to shorten my bench in the second half, which affects a lot of guys. So on one hand you want to play them. On the other hand, you're like, you know what, I'm going with this group. It gives me the best chance to win this game today. Another game would be a different situation maybe.

'So I don't know that you ever really come to any conclusion other than you want them to keep grinding in practice, keep coming after it, try to be as fair and open as you possibly can be in terms of giving them a shot.'

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