IOWA CITY, Iowa — Curtis Jones knows how good the group around him truly is, even if most of the attention at the top of the college basketball world is largely elsewhere.
The last six minutes at Carver-Hawkeye Arena on Thursday night proved that.
No. 3 Iowa State rallied back from a 13-point deficit on Thursday to grab an 89-80 win over Iowa — which played about as good of a game as it could’ve asked for before slipping down the stretch. That pushed the Cyclones to 8-1 on the season with conference play around the corner.
While there are plenty of other great teams out there, both in the Big 12 and elsewhere, Jones isn’t pulling any punches when it comes to ranking him and his teammates. They belong right at the top.
“I don’t feel no pressure about it. I feel confident about it,” Jones said. “Yeah, we are one of the best teams in the country.
“I feel like it shows. We’ve got the talent, we’ve got the staff, we’ve got the togetherness. I feel like we’ve got everything it takes to go far, and I’m just really confident in our abilities.”
Iowa gave the Cyclones just about everything it had on Thursday night. And for most of the game, it looked like it was going to work.
The Hawkeyes, who drained seven 3-pointers in the first 20 minutes, jumped out to a 13-point lead just before halftime. Every time the Cyclones punched back in the second half, Iowa responded to stay a step ahead. But, unlike at the Maui Invitational last month, where Iowa State suffered its only loss to Auburn, the Cylones held strong this time.
Iowa State surged ahead in the final six minutes of the game once Iowa went cold. The Hawkeyes made just two field goals from then on, both of which came in garbage time, and Iowa State took full advantage. It was a slow battle — it didn’t take the lead for the first time until the three-minute mark in the second half — but it pulled out the nine-point win.
Jones dropped a game-high 23 points off the bench for Iowa State while shooting 5-of-8 from behind the arc. Joshua Jefferson added 19 points and 10 rebounds, and Dishon Jackson added 12 points inside.
“That’s one of the best teams in the country, if not the best right now. We were right there with them for a long time,” said Iowa’s Payton Sandfort, who finished with 13 points and five rebounds in the loss. “Props to them for the way they made plays … It just kind of speaks for itself the way that they have energy the whole game. They’ve got a bunch of guys that can play, they’ve got shotmakers, they’ve got rebounders, they can defend … They’re gonna win a lot of games.”
How far can Iowa State actually go?
With the nonconference slate behind him, save for games against Omaha and Morgan State in the coming days, head coach T.J. Otzelberger will now be tasked with leading the Cyclones through the best conference in basketball.
The Big 12 can ruin any team, no matter how good. Just look at Kansas last year, which started the season out as the top-ranked team in the nation and then lost nine of its last 18 games in conference play. But Iowa State, which currently holds its best ranking in program history, is perhaps in the best position of anyone to make a run at what would be their first regular season conference title since 2001.
The Cyclones’ lone loss this season came after a game-winning bucket from Auburn in Maui last month. Otherwise, ISU has handled business when it’s needed to. The Cyclones led nearly the entire way when beating Kam Jones and then-No. 5 Marquette last week, and they cruised to a nearly 30-point win over Big 12 foe Colorado in Hawaii.
The Cyclones don’t really have a single star, either, in the way that Duke has Cooper Flagg or Kansas has Hunter Dickinson. All five of the Cyclones’ starters are averaging double figures, led by guard Keshon Gilbert’s 17.4 points per game. He had nine points and six rebounds on Thursday night.
They can, and have to, turn to anybody at any given moment. Otzelberger credited that successful strategy in part to the fact that they brought back nine players from last year’s team.
“I think it’s dangerous, because you can only put your best defender on one guy,” Jones said. “We’ve got a lot of weapons … I really trust anybody with the ball, which is what I think makes us so dangerous. If you have a weak link on defense, I think we’ll go at it.”
Iowa State is bound to find itself in similar situations as it did on Thursday night in the coming months. But now that they’ve “weathered the storm” and made it out with a win in a big game, Jones and the Cyclones know what they’re capable of. It’s just a matter of accomplishing that time and again.
“We didn’t split [tonight], which happens with a lot of programs when things start going bad, especially with the pressure that the outside has on us,” Jones said. “I don’t really think that we feel that pressure, but that’s a credit to our experience.”
