From bad to worse
As bad as things got for the Iowa basketball team during the first half of Wednesday’s lopsided loss at Wisconsin, things may have gotten even worse after the break.
The Badgers did not match the 18-0 run that overwhelmed the Hawkeyes midway through the opening half of the game, but Iowa didn’t do much to prevent Wisconsin from continuing to put on a clinic in the second half.
A 20-point halftime lead reached 30 points when Trevon Hughes scored on a lay-in with 2 minutes, 45 seconds left in the game, only adding frustration to an evening at the Kohl Center that was filled with frustration for the Hawkeyes.
“The hope at the half was to cut away at their lead in the second half, but that didn’t happen,” Iowa forward Jarryd Cole said. “One possession at a time, we expected to cut into it but we continued to struggle with the same things we struggled with in the first half. We quick shot. We didn’t show the patience we needed. We’ve got to work through that.”
The Hawkeyes, who have lost their last five road games by double-digit margins, have one last chance to correct that this season. Iowa finishes its regular-season schedule at Minnesota on Sunday.
In many respects, the Badgers simply did to Iowa what they have been doing to many opponents lately. Wisconsin shot 58.3 percent in the first half, the sixth time in the last eight games that the Badgers have topped 50 percent from the field in the opening half of a game.
The Badgers turned the ball over just seven times, slightly below their Big Ten-leading average of 9.2 per game.
Wisconsin has featured the stingiest defense in the Big Ten and the 16 first-half points Iowa mustered — including just 8 in the final 161/2 minutes — were the fewest allowed by the Badgers in the opening half of a game since Florida A&M scored 14 vs. Wisconsin on Nov. 16, 2007.
