Iowa's Tony Perkins (11) shoots the ball during practice on Mar 16, 2022, before the first round of the 2022 NCAA Tournament at KeyBank Center in Buffalo, NY. (Gregory Fisher-USA TODAY Sports)
Game Preview: Iowa Faces Experienced Richmond
Jordan Bohannon has played in 178 games in his career.
Some of the Richmond players the Iowa guard will see in Thursday’s NCAA tournament first-round game are getting up there in experience as well.
The 2:10 p.m. (CDT) game between the Hawkeyes and Spiders in Buffalo, N.Y., will be one for the ages.
Bohannon is a sixth-year player. Richmond’s Grant Golden is in his sixth season and two other starters — Nathan Cayo and Jacob Gilyard — and in their fifth seasons. Nick Sherod, who comes off the bench for the Spiders, is also in his sixth season.
“It's been really cool, the experience itself,” Gilyard said. “These are guys that I've played with for five years now, so to be able to accomplish this with them is great. We're a pretty close team on the court. I think we all kind of feed off of each other and play well together, but we're extremely close off the court. The relationships that we have with each other are incredible, so to go out this way or to be able to be here with these guys means the world to me.”
The Spiders could have easily broken up after the 2019-20 season, when the pandemic shut down the NCAA tournament.
“During when the entire country was in quarantine, when COVID ended the season and everything, I certainly had a bunch of schools sort of reach out to my high school coach and try and figure out what I was going to do with the fifth year and everything,” Golden said. “So I know that there were a lot of options out there, but I had always said if I was going to decide to come back and everything, this year, whatever it may be, that it was going to be at Richmond.”
Bohannon appreciates the Spiders’ experience.
“I have to give a lot of credit to this Richmond team,” he said. “They have a lot of those guys that came back and decided they want to do something special this year. And they’re one of the most experienced teams, very skilled. They’re really tough to guard. I can’t say enough good things about that.”
It’s Richmond’s production that comes with that experience that concerns Iowa’s coach Fran McCaffery.
“These guys were all incredibly productive 1,000-point scorers, so that gives them a lot of weapons, and I think that that has been proven, especially when they come down the stretch,” McCaffery said.
Forward Tyler Burton averages 16.3 points for the Spiders. Golden averages 14.1 and Gilyard averages 13.3.
The game between the No. 5 seed Hawkeyes (26-9) and the No. 12 seed Spiders (23-12) more than likely will come down to how Richmond can handle one of Iowa’s younger players.
Sophomore forward Keegan Murray averaged 23.6 points per season, fourth-best in NCAA Division I player and the best scoring output among Power-5 teams.
“He is an incredible player obviously,” Golden said. “He can score at all three levels. I think that's one of the most impressive things and one of the things that stands out the most on his film, and I think another thing is he just plays really hard, runs the floor great, gets out in transition. The whole team gets out in transition really well, but sort of his energy, you can see just sort of ignites them a little bit.
“I think with players like that, obviously, the saying is, I don't know if you can stop them, you can only hope to contain them, so hopefully we can just go out there and make everything tough for him and make him earn every basket that he gets.”
“Murray is amazing,” Richmond coach Chris Mooney said. “He can score in so many ways. He is so fluid, athletic, calm, incredibly in control. He is tremendous. He is better than I thought he was before we started watching them.
“I'm not sure where he is projected in the NBA draft, but I imagine very high. He's a great player. I don't know, if you average 23 points per game, I'm not sure that anybody has guarded you very well in that conference. He is an amazing player and someone that will take the whole team to defend and to make sure that we make him make as hard of shots as possible, which he is capable of, but still want to make them as hard as possible.”
Both teams won their respective conference tournaments with four victories in four days. Richmond won the Atlantic-10 tournament just a couple of hours before Iowa defeated Purdue for the Big Ten title.
Iowa, though, has been getting a lot of the attention as a favorite to win the NCAA championship. Last season, the Hawkeyes got that kind of attention and didn’t make it out of the second round.
This season, the expectations came after Iowa went on a 12-2 run to end the season.
“We really don't talk about that at all because that kind of stuff happens all year long,” McCaffery said. “It didn't happen for this team, what you just said, but it did for last year's team, and it's something that I think our guys have to know and understand. That's what people are going to talk about. You're going to be good. You're not going to be good. You're going to be really good. You have a chance.
“The only way we handle that is to specifically focus on the next game and not look too far ahead or not think too much about all of the talk around what's possible. I think you have to take care of the present. That's what we're trying to do.”
