Hawkeyes win opening European exhibition
Posted on 13. Aug, 2013 by admin in Iowa Basketball
By Brendan Stiles
HawkeyeDrive.com
In the first of six overseas exhibitions, the Iowa Hawkeyes were able to cruise to a 102-58 victory over the London Lions on Tuesday in Great Britain’s capital.
The game began with Iowa jumping out to an early 20-9 in the first quarter and the Hawkeyes never relinquished their advantage. Leading the charge was freshman guard Peter Jok, who played a game-high 30 minutes despite coming off the bench Tuesday and finished with team-highs of 22 points and eight rebounds.
Jok was one of five Hawkeye players to finish in double figures scoring. Iowa’s other newcomer — sophomore forward Jarrod Uthoff — was among the starting five and came away with 14 points on 7-of-10 shooting and six rebounds while playing 24 minutes.
“I just wanted to get those guys a lot of minutes and let them play through any mistakes they might have made, keep them on the floor,” Iowa head coach Fran McCaffery said during a postgame interview with Hawkeye Sports. “I thought their conditioning was really good and their versatility. They scored the ball.”
Prior to the team’s departure last weekend, McCaffery mentioned experimenting with a multitude of rotations over the six exhibitions. His starting five on Tuesday featured Uthoff, a backcourt of sophomore Anthony Clemmons and junior Josh Oglesby, and he started both sophomore Adam Woodbury and junior Gabe Olaseni, who had the first of two opportunities this week to play in his hometown of London.
Olaseni played 26 minutes and tallied 11 points while shooting 5-of-6 from the floor, while Oglesby shot 4-of-6 from behind the arc to come away with 12 points and six rebounds. Meanwhile, senior forward Zach McCabe also provided a boost off the bench for Iowa like Jok did. In 20 minutes of play, McCabe shot 5-of-7 from the floor and finished with 13 points, plus five assists.
Clemmons only scored four points, but also had seven rebounds and a team-high nine assists. Woodbury scored seven of Iowa’s first 13 points, but ended up playing just nine minutes due to having four fouls. The 7-1 center finished with nine points and five rebounds and shot 3-of-4 from the free-throw line. Redshirt freshman forward Kyle Meyer played 15 minutes off the bench and finished with five points on 2-of-6 shooting and five rebounds. Walk-ons Darius Stokes and Kyle Denning combined to play 33 minutes and between the two of them produced 12 points on 5-of-10 shooting.
As a team, Iowa shot 40-of-69 from the floor on Tuesday and outrebounded the Lions 56-41. The Hawkeyes also had 29 assists while forcing 16 Lion turnovers. The one area of concern following Tuesday’s exhibition would be free-throw shooting, as Iowa shot just 11-of-19 from the charity stripe (including 5-of-12 in the second half).
Seniors Devyn Marble and Melsahn Basabe and junior forward Aaron White were all held out of Tuesday’s exhibition, as was sophomore guard Mike Gesell, who is still recovering from a hand injury suffered last month. Marble, Basabe and White are all expected to play in Wednesday’s exhibition, which is also against the London Lions at 1:30 p.m. Central in front of what reportedly will be a sold-out crowd at the Copper Box in London.
“They did not play their top five guys tonight because they have 6,000 people coming tomorrow night,” McCaffery said. “They wanted to play their young kids tonight and we played our young guys. Tomorrow night will be a different kind of game and a totally different atmosphere, so that’s what we got to get our guys ready for mentally.”
BOX SCORE: Iowa vs. London Lions (8/13/2013)
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