Hawkeyes complete London sweep
Posted on 14. Aug, 2013 by admin in Iowa Basketball
By Brendan Stiles
HawkeyeDrive.com
The setting was the same, but that was all that remained unchanged. Instead of an empty arena with seats full of various colors, there was a sell-out crowd of 6,000 spectators on hand at London’s Copper Box. Both the Iowa Hawkeyes and London Lions assembled different starting lineups than they did for their prior exhibition one day earlier.
Iowa was presented with a mentally different challenge Wednesday, but passed it with ease by notching a 107-72 victory — its second in as many days — over the Lions.
Once again, the Hawkeyes took an early lead and never looked back. After holding out junior forward Aaron White and seniors Devyn Marble and Melsahn Basabe in Tuesday’s contest, all three of them were in the starting lineup Wednesday along with juniors Josh Oglesby and London native Gabe Olaseni.
Iowa quickly jumped out to an early 7-2 lead in the first quarter that would balloon up to 28-15. The Lions went on a run and trimmed the Hawkeye lead down to 39-36 before freshman guard Peter Jok sparked an Iowa counter run that allowed the Hawkeyes to hold a 49-37 advantage at halftime.
For the second straight night, Jok led Iowa with 18 points and was one of five Hawkeye players to reach double figures scoring. The others were Oglesby (17 points), White (16 points), Olaseni (14 points) and Basabe (12 points).
“The start of the second half was going to be critical. Does it get back to 3 or 5 or do we take it to 20? We took it to 20 quickly,” Iowa head coach Fran McCaffery said during a postgame interview with Hawkeye Sports. “Josh was on fire, Whitey was up in the passing lanes. We got our break going. Basabe was tremendous. Gabe was great. I was just really pleased with the effort there.
“Then when I went to my bench, those guys came in and did the same thing, and that’s what I want to see. I think our strength is in the fact that we have more good players than almost anybody else.”
In the third quarter, Iowa was able to accumulate 35 points — 10 of which came from the free-throw line — to build its lead back up to 83-59 and went on cruise control from there.
The Hawkeyes now head to Paris, France for the third and fourth of their six exhibitions in Europe. Iowa will face the AMW All-Stars on Aug. 16, with tip-off from Paris scheduled for 1:30 p.m. Central.
*No final box score was made available due to a malfunction with the machine used at the Copper Box for compiling game statistics. All point totals mentioned come courtesy of Iowa SID Matt Weitzel.
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