Hlas: Minnesota steals Hawkeyes’ thunder

IOWA CITY — This one was hard on Iowa's eyes.

Minnesota gouged the Hawkeyes' men's basketball team for nine steals and 16 forced turnovers Thursday while turning the ball over just six times itself. Which is all the data you need to know about why the Gophers upset Iowa 64-59 at Carver-Hawkeye Arena.

It was a hugely disappointing loss for the Hawkeyes, dropping a home game against a team that had been 4-7 in the Big Ten and hadn't beaten a conference foe on the road.

But Minnesota's good on given nights. So is Iowa. But not this one. Especially on offense.

'Our screening and our cutting and our movement wasn't nearly as sharp as it needed to be,' Iowa Coach Fran McCaffery said.

'We were a little stagnant. We were telegraphing our post feeds. We were not making the kind of screens that get people open. We were not cutting to score. We were cutting to space.'

That's a lot of negative inventory. It was simply a blah night from start to finish, save for the glimmer of hope near the end.

All the momentum the Hawkeyes built with back-to-back resounding victories at Michigan and at home against Maryland slipped away like the ball in Mike Gesell's hands as he drove with 11 seconds left and Iowa down 62-59.

The strategy of not going for a tying 3-pointer on that possession can be argued, especially since said strategy didn't work.

'If we can be down one with 11 seconds,' McCaffery said, 'have a chance to press, foul again, we can still get the ball back twice.'

You see NBA teams do that late in tight games when they're behind. They also have NBA talent, and they get the ball at midcourt after timeouts.

Doing it the way Iowa did seemed a tall order, but there was no great option at that point. Minnesota was guarding the 3-point line. The Gophers guarded for 40 minutes, actually.

'Really good, really good,' said Minnesota Coach Richard Pitino.

All 6-feet-10 of Maurice Walker stood its ground as Gesell drove at him on that aforementioned stop. Walker stripped the ball from the 6-2 guard. It was a fitting play to be the decider, with all those Gopher steals and all that disruption throughout the game.

'It was big because guys get scared to be aggressive in that spot,' Pitino said. 'They just want to be passive, so for him to have that alertness to get a steal and then knock down big free throws was huge.'

It had looked like the path was greased for Iowa to add three, and maybe up to six more consecutive wins going into its game at Indiana March 3. But in hindsight, that was wild-eyed optimism from the glow of the previous two games, not the team's entire body of work or an accurate rendition of life in the Big Ten.

Instead of staying in a tie for second place in the conference's loss column, the Hawkeyes take a 6-5 league record to Northwestern Sunday. The Wildcats have lost their last 10 games. Yet, somehow it's doubtful Iowa will be overlooking them.

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