Achtung Baby
Was Iowa's close call against West Virginia an uncharacteristic slow night, or a template for the rest of its opponents?
“Everyone has a plan until they get punched in the mouth.”
— Mike Tyson
It’s not that difficult to gameplan Iowa.
For the first three years, most teams took a “pick your poison” approach with Caitlin Clark. You could accept that she was going to get something close to 40 points and try to lock down the rest of Iowa’s roster. The problem with that approach is that, once Clark understood what was going on, she was fully capable of scoring 50 and winning the game alone. Most teams abandoned this relatively quickly.
The other option was to triple team Clark as soon as she crossed midcourt, and hope that enough defensive rotation and bad shooting luck would work to keep the rest of Iowa’s roster from tearing you apart. In the days of the Law Firm, that was a recipe for disaster, as Monika Czinano would get position in the post and score before you could rotate. Two passes and a layup was all it took.
With the graduation of Czinano and McKenna Warnock, Iowa has gone to a four-guard setup, and opponents have been slowly gravitating toward the latter approach. There have been times where it really, really hasn’t worked, like Hannah Stuelke’s 47-point performance against Penn State, where the old Czinano blueprint worked flawlessly. When Stuelke in particular, but also Marshall or Martin or Davis or Affolter, were shooting well and making plays on offense, the whole thing sort of fell apart; there’s a reason why Caitlin Clark leads the nation in assist rate. This was especially true on nights where, despite double- and triple-teams, Clark was still scoring. It’s simply not easy to run an effective double-team from 38 feet away.
It worked for Kansas State in November, as the Wildcats threw defenders at Clark and held her to 9/32 shooting — 2/16 from three — and just three assists. Nobody else on Iowa’s roster truly stepped up to fill the void; Molly Davis was the Hawkeyes’ second leading scorer with 10 off the bench. The two three-point shots made by Clark were the only two Iowa made all day, Iowa committed 16 turnovers against just 9 assists, and Kansas State won fairly comfortably.
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