Iowa basketball: 2019-20 season preview for the Hawkeyes

Iowa Basketball made the NCAA Tournament last year. Should this Hawkeye team be expected to do the same?

Coming into last season, Iowa basketball looked loaded…if it could play any sort of defense.

That was a pretty huge “if.” It’s why the Hawkeyes finished just 14-19 and 11th in the Big Ten in 2017-18 despite an offense that scored nearly 80 points per game. It’s why they were picked just 10th in the Big Ten despite losing just one scholarship senior.

Iowa’s defense ranked 242nd in the country, per KenPom, and dead last or close to it in the Big Ten in every category that mattered. Field goal percentage. Turnover rate. Rebounding. You name it — the Hawkeyes were atrocious.

But with the offensive talent in Iowa City, the bar to clear wasn’t too high. With Tyler Cook and Luka Garza feasting on the conference’s bigs, Jordan Bohannon and Joe Wieskamp bombing away from outside, and Isaiah Moss, Nicholas Baer and Ryan Kriener providing the ancillary scoring, all the Hawkeyes had to do was sniff competence.

That much, they did. Coach Fran McCaffery instituted a handful of pressure and zone looks that the Hawkeyes mixed in with a traditional man-to-man, and while that strategy wasn’t particularly well-executed, it at least gave other teams something to think about. Iowa jumped to 111th in defensive efficiency, and its offense kept firing on all cylinders.

With a defense that could at least give some margin for error, the Hawkeyes stormed out of the gates. They won 16 of their first 19 games, hit No. 6 Michigan with its second loss, and seemed to be well on their way to contending in the Big Ten.

Then, just like it did in 2014 and 2016, the bottom fell out.

At 20-5 and ranked No. 20 in the nation, Iowa lost five of its last six regular-season games and exited the Big Ten Tournament unceremoniously. The late slump wasn’t enough to put the Hawkeyes on the bubble, but it doubled their NCAA Tournament seeding anyway.

There, Iowa did what it did all season: score a lot of points and scare the living daylights out of everyone. It beat Cincinnati and came back from a 25-point deficit to take No. 2-seed Tennessee to overtime, where the Hawkeyes came up just short.

Expectations haven’t been as high for Iowa this season, in part because of the departure of Cook to the NBA and in larger part because of Bohannon’s hip surgery, which took place in May and was expected to keep him out for all of 2019-20. But Bohannon’s recovery has progressed much faster than anticipated, and if he decides he’s healthy enough to return to action, the Hawkeyes’ outlook changes dramatically.