HoopsHD at the Big 10 Tourney: Photo essay (Day 2)

HoopsHD is always hovering around the edge of legitimacy (see Puppet, The), but thanks to the good folks at the Big 10 we are kicking it up a notch this week with a media credential to the Big 10 Tourney in DC. From his prime perch in the 2nd row Jon Teitel will be bringing you daily updates of all the action from the Verizon Center via a series of photo essays. Day 2 saw a quartet of games without any of the top-4 seeds, plus a scheduling conflict with the all-important Arizona-Colorado Pac-12 quarterfinal on TV, so the only report from Thursday is #7-seed Iowa vs. #10-seed Indiana.

Bad news: twice as many games today = twice as many reporters = I got pushed all the way down past the baseline:

Good news: MUCH better view of Molly McGrath:

The Hawkeyes were out in full force with their mascot/band:

With both teams squarely  on the bubble it certainly  had the  feel  of a play-in game, and the intensity both on the court and in the stands was noticeably greater than the previous day.  Iowa was able to keep it close for the 1st 20 minutes and only trailed by 3 at the half despite leading scorer Peter Jok not even scoring a single point for the 1st 15 minutes of the game.  FR PG Jordan Bohannon was the hero for Iowa with his 1st career double-double: 24 PTS, 10 AST, and 6-11 from behind the arc.  However, Indiana’s offense was outstanding in the 2nd half, scoring 52 PTS in the 2nd stanza en route to a 95-73 win that was not as close as the score indicated.  The Hoosiers shot  almost 68% from the field in the 2nd half and shot 60.3 FG% for the entire game, so even a double-double off the bench from Iowa FR PF Cordell Pemsl was not enough to stem the tide.

At the postgame press conference I asked Iowa coach (and Penn alum!) Fran McCaffery if he thought that Bohannon was going to end up rewriting the school record book after such a fantastic rookie season, and he said that his PG has already begun to do so:

When you see Coach standing in the hallway you can see that he is even taller in person:

I also asked Indiana coach Tom Crean about his feisty fist-pump with 5 minutes left as he watched his players diving for loose balls even while they had a 25-PT lead, and he said that toughness is a skill just like everything else a basketball player can do:

I did not stick around for Rutgers-Northwestern, which turned out to be a wise move as the Wildcats did their best  Indiana impression by winning a Big 10 game by 22. The highlight of the night was watching my own Wildcats beat Colorado, but the over-under on how late I can stay up to watch their Pac-12 semifinal contest with UCLA on Friday is midnight.  Check back tomorrow for my Day 3 photo essay about all 4 quarterfinal games!