Iowa basketball: Hawks blown out by Michigan State Spartans

The Iowa basketball team suffered their second loss of the season at the hands of the #10 Michigan State Spartans last night. Here is the unfortunate recap.

If you didn’t get to watch the game last night, consider yourself lucky. The men’s Iowa basketball team was absolutely dreadful to watch for the last 27 minutes of the game. For the first 13 minutes, however, the Hawkeyes were playing strong basketball against the Spartans and were trading shots with the trendy Final Four sleeper pick.

The wheels came off though.

With Iowa bringing the game to within one point on Nicholas Baer made-jumper to make the score 26-25, the Spartans turned it up a notch. Tom Izzo’s squad went on a 9-1 run in the next three minutes and never looked back. They would finish out the half up 43-33.

The second half didn’t start much. Team leader Jordan Bohannon who had an otherwise terrible game was the first to score for the Hawkeyes. He didn’t, however, score until four minutes until the second half which by that point the Spartans had scored nine more points to build a 19-point lead.

It actually managed to get worse as Michigan State went on another run after that and held a 32-point advantage over the Iowa basketball team with a little over eight minutes remaining in the game.

The Hawks would close the gap slightly losing by 22 points when the final whistle blew. Losing the first two Big Ten games was not an ideal way to start conference play but losing at home in a game they should have won against Wisconsin and getting smoked by Michigan State 90-68 makes it that much more painful.

Offensively, the Hawks couldn’t get anything going, but it was also self-inflicted to an extent. Poor shot selection, rushed shots, and a lack of ball movement contributed to Iowa’s season-worst shooting percentage of 32.8% from the field. They were able to get to the line somewhat consistently, but still fell five free throws short of their season average against a team that is notorious for fouling a lot. Moreover, the Hawks couldn’t convert on these attempts shooting a painful 66.7% from the charity stripe.

Jordan Bohannon had another bad outing shooting just 4 from 12 from the field and dishing out zero assists. Luke Garza managed to shoot even worse hitting just one of his ten shots and spending half the evening on the bench due to foul trouble. To make matters worse, freshman sensation Joe Wieskamp limped off the court late in the game with an apparent ankle injury.

Michigan State, meanwhile, put up 90 points (their third best outing of the season) on a scoring binge by Nick Ward (10-10 for 26 points) and Kenny Goins (6-11 for 19 points). The dynamic guard duo of Cassius Winston and Joshua Langford were held to 22 points on 7 of 22 shooting.

Much like the Wisconsin loss, the Iowa basketball team must have a quick memory as they need to get mentally prepared to face off against their in-state rival Iowa State Cyclones Thursday night.