Hawkeyes Miss, And Miss, And Miss, In Loss To Huskers

Iowa's missed shots lead to 76-70 loss at Nebraska.

LINCOLN, Neb. — It was a wish that couldn’t be heard.

Joe Toussaint was only a freshman playing in the 14th game of his college career, but he knows the capabilities of his Iowa teammates.

He would say the same thing on every miss.

“Keep shooting your shot,” Toussaint said. “It’s going to fall, it’s going to fall, it’s going to fall.”

Few of them fell.

Pinnacle Bank Arena has become Iowa’s house of horrors, and Tuesday’s 76-70 loss by the Hawkeyes to Nebraska had a lot of little nightmares.

The Hawkeyes took 77 shots, and made 32. That’s 41.6 percent. Not bad.

They took 33 3-pointers, … and made 4.

Not good.

Connor McCaffery made three of the 3-pointers, so he became a spokesman of sorts to describe this … whatever it was.

“I think we got good shots,” McCaffery said.

His father agreed.

“Yeah, I did (think they were good looks),” Iowa coach Fran McCaffery said.

The good looks were deceiving.

Connor McCaffery thought back to the box score. Guard Joe Wieskamp, who came in leading the Hawkeyes in 3-point field goals and had made 41.7 percent of them this season, went 1-of-10.

One-of-10.

“Weezy’s a great shooter,” Connor said. “He goes 1-for-10.”

He shrugged.

“What are you going to do?” he said.

Center Luka Garza was just as befuddled.

“The guy goes 1-for-10 today,” Garza said. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen that guy go 1-for-10, in practice or anything.”

Wieskamp had two open 3-pointers on Iowa’s first possession, and missed them both.

It was only the beginning for Wieskamp and his teammates. They would miss 17 of their first 18 3-point attempts before a McCaffery make with 5 1/2 minutes left in the first half.

“Yeah, they were good looks,” Wieskamp said of all of his shots. “Obviously I’m frustrated in myself. I don’t think I’ve ever shot that bad in my life.”

And Wieskamp finished with a game-high 21 points.

“Obviously I could have had a big night if some shots were falling,” he said.

“It’s just one of those nights.”

The obvious solution would have been to get the ball inside to Garza, a 22.5-points-per-game scorer. But Garza was constantly in a traffic jam of Huskers. Double-teams — heck, even triple-teams at times — haunted him every time he could get the ball.

“They just packed it in,” Fran McCaffery said.

“This was the most focused game plan I’ve ever seen on me, in terms of just trying not to let me get anything in the post, not letting me go (isolation) on anybody,” said Garza, who finished with 16 points and 18 rebounds, his ninth double-double of the season.

“The guys bought into the game plan and believed in it,” said Nebraska coach Fred Hoiberg, the architect of the night’s lane chaos. “We really tried to pack the paint. We felt our only chance of winning the game was to sit two or three bodies in the paint at all times and then close out to the shooters, and we did a good job at that.”

Haanif Cheatham (@hcheatham_22) was flexin' in the first half. @HuskerHoops leads Iowa 38-31 at the break: pic.twitter.com/A48AXeLupN

— Big Ten Network (@BigTenNetwork) January 8, 2020

And yet, Iowa (10-5 overall, 1-3 Big Ten), down by as much as 12 points in the first half, took the lead in the second half at 51-50 after Wieskamp’s lone made 3-pointer, capping a stretch in which the Hawkeyes had eight assists on nine made field goals.

An offense that had so many misfires seemed finally have a hum.

But, with the game tied at 59, Nebraska’s Thorir Thorbjanson hit back-to-back 3-pointers sandwiched around a Wieskamp layup. The Huskers (7-8, 2-2) would not trail again.

The fact that the Hawkeyes took as many shots as they did, despite all of the misses, didn’t bother Fran McCaffery. The coach knows he has good shooters — the Hawkeyes had shot 46.1 percent coming into the game, 36.7 percent in 3-pointers.

“I have complete confidence,” McCaffery said.

That confidence, though, was missing from his players in the second half. Some of the open shots, McCaffery said, seemed like afterthoughts, and those aren’t good shots to take.

“To be honest, they were packing it in, making it easier on us,” said Toussaint, who had 14 points. “I felt like we were just very tentative on offense, second-guessing ourselves. We’re all good players. But, tonight, we just second-guessed ourselves a lot.”

Why?

“Because we were missing (shots),” Toussaint said. “Our misses discouraged us. We were just scared to make a mistake, or scared to take another shot if we missed. That just goes back to we were off today.”

“If they keep playing like that, we’re going to keep shooting,” Connor McCaffery said. “We’re going to make shots. We needed to be better all-around tonight. Shooting what it was, we still had a chance to win. We just have to be better as a whole.”

The Huskers shot 49.1 percent for the game, 38.5 percent in 3-pointers. Five scored in double figures.

“They just played harder than us, tougher than us,” Toussaint said. “We were just off tonight. Yeah, just off. Not together, not connected.”

“I think we have to recognize how the game is going,” Fran McCaffery said. “What’s the flow of the game? The shots aren’t going, OK. We’ve got to drive the ball more, screen more. We’ve got to go in and out, we’ve got to attack more. Maybe a little more attention to detail. We were somewhat connected in that area, but not good enough.”

Two of Iowa’s three previous losses here have come in overtime, in games the Hawkeyes seemed to control until the final minutes.

This one was its own special calamity.

Toussaint thought back to the numbers on the box score, to all of the misses he saw.

“That determined the game for us,” he said. “We can’t let that happen.”