Fran McCaffery shares impressive part of Tony Perkins' big game

Iowa snagged a key Big Ten win against Illinois over the weekend, and Tony Perkins‘ big game was a major factor in that win.

The junior guard went absolutely postal on the Fighting Illini, popping off for 32 points on 8-of-11 shooting from the floor. He was so hot his teammates were actively trying to get him more looks during the game.

“It was ‘OK, this guy’s cooking. Just keep going,'” coach Fran McCaffery said. “What was impressive to me about that was the players that were on the floor with him, they’re yelling out plays to me that we should be running for him.

“So they recognized that, like, OK, this guy’s on fire, we’re going to him. Nobody else is shooting the ball right now. It helped that we were in the double bonus already. We got into the bonus pretty quickly, pretty much because of him.”

In addition to his massive night shooting the ball, Perkins was almost automatic from the free-throw stripe.

And he got there quite a bit.

By the time the game had ended his final line read 15-of-16 from the charity stripe. And Iowa needed every one of his 32 points, managing to top Illinois 81-79 to secure the program’s seventh conference win.

There haven’t been many outings like that in Iowa basketball in recent memory.

Even Perkins hadn’t had many nights like that. While he has been a double-figure scorer in 13 games this season, he had topped the 20-point mark only once before Tony Perkins’ big game netted him 32 points on Saturday.

It left even his coach short on words to describe how good the performance was.

“We just kept going to him,” McCaffery said. “I’ve been doing this a long time and I haven’t had too many guys go off like that. That was impressive.”