Prior to the Cyclones’ Big 12 Championship game win over Houston, they entered the conference tournament with serious doubt, which they used to jump-start an electric post-season run.
The journey continues for Iowa State who now has its sights on a round of 64 matchup with South Dakota State, where the team would land was up in the air heading into the conference tournament.
While they were still projected as a top-three seed heading into the Big 12 Tournament, the Cyclones were coming off a rough offensive stretch, averaging 57 points in their final five regular season games.
Even though they were winning games late against Oklahoma, UCF and BYU, the Cyclones were not playing at their best late in the season. They had multiple poor shooting performances combined with slow starts, with every game feeling like Iowa State could be upset.
The Cyclones had nothing left in their bag of tricks for the team’s final regular season game in a discouraging loss to Kansas State. They continued to look unlike themselves; nothing was consistently clicking on offense and their defense was not as effective as it had been earlier in the season.
“We knew we didn’t play our best and we knew we needed to change things coming into postseason play,” Milan Momcilovic said.
Outside of knowing they had not been playing their best basketball late in the season, the loss to the Wildcats reminded Iowa State of its mortality as a team.
“That kind of put us in the mindset of like ‘Yeah, we could be beat,’ and it humbled us a bit,” Keshon Gilbert said.
Following the loss, this is when head coach T.J. Otzelberger knew he and his staff needed to iron these issues out before they entered the postseason.
The Cyclones had secured a double bye in the Big 12 Tournament, and with that extra time, it was time to reinstate the mentality they previously had success with.
“We weren’t as focused as we needed to be in a lot of aspects,” Otzelberger said. “It was great to have an opportunity to get back to the practice court, where truthfully, we didn’t know who we would be playing so that we could just focus on us, especially offensively.”
“We went back to practice, got to work, got back to doing what we do every day and it ended up paying off in the end,” Gilbert said.
Following four days of rest, Iowa State once again was pinned against Kansas State in the quarterfinals and was a completely different team.
The Cyclones got back to forcing turnovers which generated their offense and constantly forcing Kansas State into bad shots.
But that was only a sign of what was to come.
Iowa State rode its offensive resurgence to two more wins, each with more impressive shooting numbers and defensive stops.
Against Baylor, the Cyclones shot 50% from 3-point range, setting up shots with ease and not letting their egos get in the way of the task at hand to win 76-62.
In the championship game against Houston, Iowa State finished its conference tournament run with a 28-point win, dominating the Cougars in the second half.
“It was good to get revenge on really all three teams and really blow all three teams out, it wasn’t close,” Momcilovic said.
Going into the Big 12 Tournament on one of their worst stretches of the season, the Cyclones used their loss to Kansas State to drive their postseason run. It gave them an opportunity to get their minds right and revert back to playing their winning style of basketball.
Iowa State averaged 73.6 points per game on 47% shooting from the field and is heading into the NCAA Tournament on one of the team’s hottest streaks of the season. All thanks to a loss in its regular-season finale, which helped them set the reset button.
