Iowa basketball: Fran McCaffery expects to win after disappointing ’17-’18 season

The Iowa basketball team is one month away from starting the 2018-2019 season. After a disappointing season last year, Fran expects to win this year.

Last season wasn’t fun for Iowa basketball fans. The Hawkeye basketball team struggled in a season that saw the men’s basketball team win the second-least amount of games in the McCaffery era. This year, however, expectations are that the Iowa basketball team will get back on the winning track, and for good reason.

The Hawks return every major contributor to the team plus a very talented freshman, Joe Wieskamp, who by all measures is likely to play a very integral role on the team. In fact, Iowa is returning their nine top scorers from last season. Meanwhile, Wieskamp, is a four-star recruit who was ranked as the 60th best prospect in the nation.

In Monday’s press conference, Fran McCaffery agreed that the expectations for the Iowa basketball program is to win.

"You start the season, you feel like you have a good team; we’re supposed to win. Let’s go win. Let’s put it together. Let’s compete together. Let’s understand how each of us can help the other."

After one of the more successful four-year runs in Iowa basketball history, the Hawks were facing a small rebuild, but the stars are aligning in 2018 for a return to the NCAA Tournament as we called out literally years ago.

This though will not come without a little bit of change to what the Iowa basketball program is doing. McCaffery acknowledged that he had to do some self-reflecting after last year’s 14-18 season, and it sounds like he has a pretty solid idea of what went wrong.

Defense.

"Our offensive numbers were really good last year. I mean, tremendously good.But our defensive numbers were not. So, okay, we have to spend more time in practice, whether it’s breaking drills down, one-on-one, two-on-two, three-on-three, four-on-four, and then ultimately five-on-five. Okay, how do we transition defensively; what have we been teaching.We have to reorganize how we teach that. Ball screen defense; you could go staff-by-staff throughout the country and you might have staffs that spend four hours a day talking about ball screens. It’s just one of those things."

Part of this is player-oriented and part of this is the scheme. From Fran’s perspective, the players are working hard to improve defensively and he is working hard to revamp a broken scheme.

"Schematically, well, you know, we thought this would work; it didn’t work, so let’s change how we do that."

McCaffery went on to give a little more insight into how each individual player is improving as well.

"Well, Luke hasn’t been playing. I think Cook’s much better. I think Joe Wieskamp has been a really good, consistent defender. Baer has been substantially better.I think Bohannon and Moss have been better. Those two guys are scorers, that’s what they are. They also give it up easy, but they are more offensive-oriented.But I think Kriener and Pemsl have been showing that they can guard, too. Nunge has been blocking some shots and playing his more natural position, so he’s been much more effective."

Whether or not this translates into an actual game remains to be seen. Last season, the Iowa basketball team ranked 317th out of 351 teams in points allowed per game (78.7) while their offense was ranked 48th in points per game (79.7).

If they can work on stopping the opposing team’s offense, they should have plenty of firepower offensively to make a run in the Big Ten this season.