Iowa has gotten off to an 8-3 start this season, with what should be an important road win over North Carolina already on its resume. The Hawkeyes also don’t have any bad losses (unless Syracuse ends up faltering in the ACC), using their depth and size to bully the teams that they should beat — winning those games by an average of 25.9 points. While last year’s bugaboo, the defense, has improved significantly, the offense has faltered, going from the fifth best offensive efficiency nationally to 64th. If it’s not one thing; it’s another — that might be the mantra around Iowa City this season. What has caused Iowa’s offensive problems this season, and what can the team do to fix them?
The Hawkeyes have worse offensive numbers pretty much across the board this season. Losing go-to scorer Roy Devyn Marble has hurt considerably, but the loss of Melsahn Basabe and his 11.7 percent offensive rebounding rate hasn’t helped. Iowa is playing at a slower tempo (two fewer possessions per game), but it’s also taking more threes (25 percent vs. 21 percent). They also have a tendency to settle for long twos, leading to fewer free throw attempts and a drop in effective field goal percentage from 51.2 to 47.0 percent this year. Aaron White is still doing Aaron White things, meaning he gets to the line and scores in transition; and Gabriel Olaseni is also still putting up numbers consistent with his production from last season. But Mike Gesell, Jarrod Uthoff, Adam Woodbury and Josh Oglesby have all seen their offensive ratings take a dip without a corresponding increase in usage rates. Losing Marble has obviously caused a strain across the board, as he not only took a high volume of shots but could also create for himself when things got tough.
Fixing things with his existing personnel will not be easy, but head coach Fran McCaffery could make some changes to facilitate better results. One not so drastic change would be to put Olaseni in the starting lineup and play Woodbury off the bench. They play a similar number of minutes right now, (Olaseni: 17.5 MPG; Woodbury: 21.4 MPG), so flipping those numbers around wouldn’t be too difficult. Olaseni has played well and with more energy than the 7’1″ former Iowa prep star. Having White and Olaseni on the floor early to draw fouls could pay dividends throughout the remainder of the game. Another thing they could do which would make them really difficult to match up with would be to steal a page from the Wisconsin playbook with their “Redwood” lineup. The Badgers go exceptionally big sometimes, with Sam Dekker playing the role of a 6’9″ shooting guard. Iowa could try something similar if it played White, Uthoff, Woodbury, and Olaseni at the same time. White or Uthoff don’t have the same athleticism as Dekker to be able to pull this off for long stretches of the game, but this unit would be able to live in the paint getting easy buckets. Lastly, with Oglesby in the midst of a horrendous shooting slump (11-of-48 on threes for the season), maybe it’s time to give freshman Brady Ellingson a longer look. It would be tough because it would probably crush the senior’s confidence, but Ellingson has shot the ball well in limited minutes (4-of-6 from three).
Iowa has two more games left before conference play begins — vs. Northern Iowa on Saturday and North Florida two days later — so McCaffery doesn’t have much time to make sweeping changes. But a slight tweak here or there on the margins could improve the offense just enough to provide the catalyst for a strong finish to the season rather than the meltdown that occurred in February and March of last year.