Iowa Back Home for Gophers

By John Bohnenkamp 

Iowa’s men’s basketball team is back home after its week-long trip to Los Angeles that contributed two losses to the Hawkeyes’ record.

Now it’s two home games in four days, and the Hawkeyes may have to do it without Payton Sandfort.

The senior forward, injured during Friday’s 94-70 loss at UCLA, didn’t practice on Sunday, and coach Fran McCaffery said he isn’t sure if Sandfort will play in Tuesday’s 8:07 p.m. game against Minnesota at Carver-Hawkeye Arena.

“We’ll see,” McCaffery said.

Losing Sandfort, who averages 16.2 points per game, isn’t what the Hawkeyes (12-6 overall, 3-4 Big Ten, 55 NET) need right now. They’re coming off back-to-back losses to USC and UCLA, and they can’t afford too many more defeats, especially as they head into a five-game stretch that includes four home games.

All but one of Iowa’s losses have been on the road, and they’re 3-0 in Big Ten home games.

“Home games haven't been too much of a problem for us,” guard Brock Harding said. “We've kind of come in locked in. Fans have been good at home, kind of keeping us locked in. We've come out with a lot of energy in most of our games, and kind of put our foot down early and played pretty good defense, locked in, been in gaps, kind of rebounded the ball a little bit better at home. We’ve got to keep that going throughout this week.”

“I'm glad to be back,” sophomore Owen Freeman said. “Obviously, LA was, outside of basketball, a pretty fun trip. It's good to be home and play in front of our fans again.”

The Hawkeyes left for Los Angeles with momentum after home wins over Nebraska and Indiana, with the 85-60 win over the Hoosiers one of the best defensive efforts of the season. Then their two losses last week were a couple of their worst defensive efforts.

“Obviously, our defense wasn't a highlight of this trip,” Freeman said. “We all need to come together again and just be able to execute, because we’ve seen flashes of how good we can be defensively in games like Nebraska and Indiana, and we just need to carry that onto the road, and that's just our next step in becoming a great team.”

“I think we went out there with a mindset of how we wanted to keep what we had done in our two games at home, and we didn't live up to what we had talked about in practice and what we executed in practice,” Harding said. “Game time showed up, we just didn't put together what we have been working on throughout the week.”

Asked what kind of changes the Hawkeyes could make on defense, McCaffery said, “

We're always changing things up defensively. We're mixing man and zone. We're mixing ball-screen coverages, or mixing pressure or mixing aggressive versus contained. So that's constant.”

Minnesota (9-9, 1-6, 121 NET) is coming off an 84-81 win over Michigan last Thursday, the Gophers’ first victory in Big Ten play.

“You could see it coming for them, because I think what you saw was a team continuing to play hard, to compete, to play together,” McCaffery said. “A lot of times, when a team is struggling it’s because they don't have what they need. That team has enough guys that can score. They have enough veteran guys. They have enough depth, and they’ve got a good coach, so they stayed together, and you give them credit, that's what this that's what this league is. You’ve got to stay together. You’ve got to keep fighting.”