Hawkeyes fall at Penn State
The struggles continues for the Iowa basketball team, but a second half rally could have provided a bit of a spark moving forward for the Hawkeyes after a hard fought 83-79 loss at Penn State on Sunday afternoon.
Hawkeye forward Kris Murray paced the Iowa offense with a career high 32 points in the loss. He scored 22 of those points after the break as Iowa attempted to rally from an 18 point halftime deficit. That included a missed shot just before halftime and three pointer made by Penn State’s Myles Dredd just before the horn to go into the break leading 44-26.
“We got off to a decent start, but didn’t finish the half very well,” Fran McCaffery said following the loss.
To Iowa’s credit, they did show fight in the second half that really didn’t happen on Thursday evening in the loss at Nebraska. Iowa came out of the break on a 5-0 to cut the lead to 13 and kept chipping away as much as they could.
“I thought the guys responded well coming out of halftime,” McCaffery said. “Our defense was better and our offense was better. I thought we were moving better and moving the ball better in the second half. We found Kris and Patrick and Tony were more aggressive.”
Eventually, Iowa whittled the lead down to two points, 81-79, after a tip-in by Kris Murray. Penn State guard missed the front end of a free throw and Iowa guard Tony Perkins pushed the ball up the floor and attempted to pass the ball to Murray, but it was stripped away by Penn State’s Seth Lundy, who sealed the game from the foul line.
McCaffery, who did not call a timeout, wasn’t upset with the play by Perkins, but he was hoping he was try to take it to the rim with the Hawkeyes only down by a pair in the final seconds.
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“What I wanted was for Tony to get downhill. I want to set a flat ball screen for him, but we set a wide double and that’s fine either way, because you are giving him space. He sort of got there and I thought he was going to keep going, which is what I wanted him to do, but he was trying to find Kris and a three, but we just wanted to tie the game.”
In addition to the career high 32 points. Murray also hauled down a team high 9 rebounds. Tony Perkins finished with 17 points, including 10 in the second half and Filip Rebraca had 13 points and 5 rebounds. After shooting 1-8 from distance in the first half, Iowa was 6-17 in the second half from three point range.
Penn State was led in scoring by Jalen Pickett with 26 points and 7 rebounds. Andrew Funk was 5-8 from three and finished with 20 points.
The Hawkeyes fall to 8-6 with the loss and 0-3 in conference play. Iowa will be back in action on January 5th when they host Indiana. Game time is set for 8 p.m. and will air on FS1. The game will mark the 40th anniversary of Carver-Hawkeye Arena.
