Jeffrey Becker/USA Today Sports
DePaul's Early Punch Rattles Hawkeyes
C.J. Fredrick has played in just two regular-season college basketball games.
But the Iowa redshirt freshman guard gave a perfect summation of what happened to the Hawkeyes on Monday night.
The 93-78 loss to DePaul in the Gavitt Tipoff Games matchup at Carver-Hawkeye Arena was a stunning blow from the beginning, and Fredrick, one of the starters, knew how it felt.
“They came out right from the jump, just kind of got in our space, kind of hit us right in the mouth early,” Fredrick said.
And the Hawkeyes never recovered.
They were down 10-0 in the first 2 1/2 minutes, 19-2 in the first 4 1/2 minutes.
“After that run, we felt like we were fighting from behind the whole game,” Fredrick said.
It was an early education for the Hawkeyes (1-1).
“We have to recognize there’s a difference between playing hard and competing,” Iowa coach Fran McCaffery said. “I thought we played hard. We didn’t compete.”
Senior forward Ryan Kriener, in that first media timeout, made sure to point out to his teammates that there was still a lot of time left, that a lot could be done in 35 1/2 minutes.
“I was trying to settle everybody down,” said Kriener about his animated speech in the huddle. “Relax, take a deep breath.”
But the Hawkeyes tried to do too much.
“I think we were trying to hit a home run right away,” sophomore Joe Wieskamp said. “When we get in those situations, we’ve got to chip away, one stop at a time. Although we were scoring at times, they were scoring right back. We couldn’t get that lead cut.”
“They were on fire,” McCaffery said of the Blue Demons (4-0), who shot 62.9 percent in the first half, 57.1 percent in 3-pointers. “We sort of had that mindset that we were going to get it all back at once. You just can’t do that. This team is long and athletic and they can compete on the glass. They’ve got a lot of different guys that can score.
“I would have expected us to be a little more concentrated in our effort, ability, just to make a run at them. I thought we started hunting shots, quick-shooting the ball, driving into packs of people, and making mistakes that were essentially inexperience mistakes by guys that have experience.”
“Everyone’s got to be on the same page,” Kriener said. “I can remember one or two times where we broke out of a timeout, and we didn’t execute like the way we wanted to. We ran a play wrong, and one time we just didn’t run the play at all. Those are two things that go into being connected.”
The Blue Demons led by as much as 25 points, and the late run by the Hawkeyes to produce the final margin came from their younger players.
Fredrick led Iowa with 16 points, 13 coming in the second half. Freshman guard Joe Toussaint had 13 points, all in the second half.
DePaul coach Dave Leitao was impressed with the way his team controlled the game.
“It always looks better when the ball goes in the basket, and it did early on,” Leitao said. “It gave us good ball movement, body movement, and full confidence.”
The first pain of the new season taught the younger Hawkeyes.
“We’ve got to do a better job, we can’t let a run linger on us,” Fredrick said. “We can’t let a run affect the rest of our first half. At the end of the day, we weren’t at our best defensively.
“At all.”
“We handled our first two games,” said Wieskamp, pointing out the exhibition win over Lindsey Wilson College and Friday’s season opener against SIU Edwardsville. “I think once there was a good, aggressive team, we got uptight. We didn’t play our ball.”
