For the second game in a row, Virginia guard Kymora Johnson scored 28 points as she led her No. 10 seed Virginia Cavaliers to victory over the No. 2 seed Iowa Hawkeyes in a 83-75 win in Carver-Hawkeye Arena.
It’s a gut wrenching loss in many ways for the Hawkeyes, who end the season with a 27-7 record, but also not unexpected. Something seemed to break in the team’s brutal loss to UCLA in the Big Ten championship game. Granted, there were only two games, but in neither of them did the Hawkeyes look like the team that had exceeded expectations all the way to a second place finish in a loaded Big Ten conference.
The offense, particularly from the guards, was almost nonexistent. In a game where much was said and written about the needed performance from Chit-Chat Wright, the sophomore guard both delivered, to the tune of 21 points, and lost the game for Iowa, between a disjointed final play in regulation that rimmed out, and missing free throws in overtime that would have iced the game. The team shot terribly from beyond the arc for the second consecutive game, shooting a measly 17% on 5-29 3-pointers. As it had many other times in the season, that left things to Ava Heiden and Hannah Stuelke in the post, who delivered. Heiden ended a breakout sophomore campaign with a 26 point, 6 rebound outing, but only hit 11-22 shot attempts. Stuelke filled out the stat sheet, netting 15 points, grabbing 19 assists, and dishing out 6 assists.
But it wasn’t enough. When the 3’s weren’t falling, Iowa was forced into difficult shots and never really found any offensive consistency. Wright’s 21 points also came on a high shot volume, and Taylor Stremlow struggled again, going 1-10 from deep and 2-13 overall to score only 5 points. When it was evident that Jensen only had trust in Journey Houston coming off the bench as well, it made things harder for the young squad, and everything that could go wrong, essentially did.
If Iowa plays to its averages, they most likely walk away with this win into the Sweet 16. Instead, we’re left with a bittersweet season that saw plenty of highs but ended with some pretty disastrous basketball. Head coach Jan Jensen, who has certainly improved her in-game coaching this season, made some head scratching decisions in the game. Her switch to zone defense when Virginia made their first run early in the game was an early indication of things going sour, and her choice to send Wright to the line over senior Kylie Feuerbach was questionable as well.
If Iowa is to succeed, Jensen will need to re-tool her offense to not be quite as post-focused as it is currently constructed. It certainly doesn’t help when you’re essentially getting zero points from 2 starters and the bench, but the overall offensive strategy still needs to improve. There were too many times this season where the offense looked stagnant at best, and at worst, lost. Losing Taylor McCabe certainly impacted that, but tightening the rotation to win games became a blade with no handle, as it took away Iowa’s ability to create scoring opportunities when the starting lineup couldn’t.
I have a lot more to write about this team later this week and in the week’s to come. For now, this season became one where a lot of things went terribly wrong (losing McCabe to injury, Teagan Mallegni missing time and falling out of the rotation as a result, and whatever the hell happened to Emely Rodriguez), and yet still was tremendously successful, if not an overachievement.
The ending exposed a lot of flaws and a lot of questions that will need to be answered in the offseason, but there was certainly a lot of good to come of it as well. This remains a young team and a program with money and space to bring in some good talent in the portal, along with a highly ranked recruit joining the ranks.
The world is certainly not ending, but it’s also going to sting for awhile that this talented group didn’t get to go out in a manner that befits the success we saw in the regular season.