Creighton will be Iowa’s first real test of season
- Creighton’s Doug McDermott and his dad/coach, Greg
Iowa’s basketball team is 3-0, beating those teams by an average of 30.6 points a game.
Now the season really starts.
The Hawkeyes host Creighton (3-0) in the Dale Howard Classic at Wells Fargo Arena. Tipoff is 3 p.m. More than 10,000 tickets have been sold, according to the Iowa Events Center ticket office Friday. Only tickets in the $10 and $20 price range are still available.
Sunday’s game will do more than see how a team picked to finish 10th in the Big Ten fares against the preseason favorite to win the Missouri Valley Conference. It will be the Hawkeyes’ first test under fire. Iowa has trailed for just 111 seconds of game time this season.
“We have a big test against a high quality national opponent getting a lot of respect,’’ Iowa senior guard Matt Gatens said. “Everyone is picking them to win the Valley. It will be a good test for us, a good benchmark to see where we’re at.”
Iowa coach Fran McCaffery knows that Creighton will tell him more about his team than the Chicago State-North Carolina A. and T.-Northern Illinois trifecta did.
Creighton, meanwhile, has passed its first big test. The Bluejays won at Alabama-Birmingham Wednesday, 70-60, snapping the Blazers’ 38-game non-conference regular-season winning streak. Sophomore forward Doug McDermott, a former Ames High School all-stater, led the Bluejays with 27 points.
“They’ve got the best player in the league in Doug McDermott,” McCaffery said. “I mean, he had 27 at UAB. That’s pretty impressive.”
In Thursday’s victory against Northern Illinois, McCaffery played a dozen players for 12 minutes or more. The Hawkeyes have had seven different players score in double figures this season – Aaron White, Eric May, Melsahn Basabe, Zach McCabe, Matt Gatens, Bryce Cartwright and Josh Oglesby .
“You have to have various people that are scoring,” McCaffery said. “You can’t put so much pressure on two people or three people every night that you have to have score, and if they don’t we can’t win. And to be honest, that’s kind of where we were last year. It was Cartwright, Gatens and Basabe. If any of those guys had an off-night or two of them had an off-night, it was going to be hard to win.”
The team McCaffery envisions coaching is the team he sees in Creighton.
“They share the ball,” McCaffery said. “They have various guys that can make shots.They made 14 3s in their first game. Five different guys madea 3.”
McCaffery sees in Creighton a team that won’t fade away when the pressure is on.
“They’re not going to panic,” McCaffery said. “They’re not going to be in a situation where in any way, shape or form they’re nervous.”
Category: Iowa Hawkeyes men's basketball
