Camels smoke Hawkeyes out of Carver
Posted on 23. Nov, 2011 by admin in Iowa Basketball
By Brendan Stiles
HawkeyeDrive.com
IOWA CITY, Iowa — Call it lack of execution. Call it lack of effort. Call it lack of whatever.
But from start to finish on Wednesday, the Iowa Hawkeyes weren’t just beaten by the Campbell Fighting Camels, they were humiliated to the tune of a 77-61 final score. Iowa has now lost two straight and sits at 3-2 five games into the 2011-12 season.
It even got to the point where Iowa head coach Fran McCaffery spent around 45 minutes in the locker room talking to his players before finally taking to the podium for his postgame press conference. The message he made to his team was quite clear though, clear enough that sophomore forward Melsahn Basabe called it self-explanatory.
“There’s nothing I could tell you that you wouldn’t already know,” Basabe said. “It’s do you want to compete or not? Are you going to win the game, or are you going to lose the game?”
With the exception of one 7-6 lead courtesy of an Eric May free throw out of the first media timeout, the Hawkeyes never held a lead in this game Wednesday. A big reason why was the Camels’ shooting, which finished 28-of-45 overall. Campbell shot 60 percent in the first half, and ended up shooting 65 percent in the second half. Of its 77 points, 36 of them came inside the paint.
Also add to that what appeared to be a game plan that was executed poorly, and this game was a recipe for disaster.
“We didn’t have the type of defensive intensity you need to have to play a team of this caliber,” McCaffery said. “But I don’t think it was just that. We weren’t executing on offense. We didn’t run the way we want to run.
“We didn’t really do anything we wanted to do.”
One of the lone bright spots on the evening was sophomore guard Devyn Marble, who came off the bench and scored 14 points. He was one of two double-figure scorers Iowa had, the other being senior guard Matt Gatens, who finished with 17 points.
Even they seemed to be at a loss for words as to how the Hawkeyes could allow a team such as Campbell to come into Carver-Hawkeye Arena and just embarrass them in front of their home crowd.
“It’s disappointing,” Gatens said. “I don’t really know exactly what’s causing it, but it’s disappointing and alarming. Hopefully we can band together. I believe we will. We need to.”
Following the holiday break, the Hawkeyes return to the court Nov. 26 for a 12 p.m. Central showdown against the IPFW Mastodons. The game is scheduled to air locally on MC-22 (Mediacom Connections). If changes aren’t made to the lineup, then it will likely be a more simplistic game plan McCaffery implements for his team this weekend.
“Maybe the simpler way to go will be more effective for this group because we still have a lot of young guys that are playing a lot of minutes,” McCaffery said. “I think we’ll get this thing figured out. We’ll get better.”
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