AMES – On a night where the seniors were celebrated and the points were hard to come by, No. 10 Iowa State fell in the home finale 88-85 to No. 23 BYU in double overtime. The Cyclones fell just shy of completing a 21-point comeback.
The loss puts the Cyclones at 22-8 overall and 12-7 in Big 12 play.
“We knew we had our chances,” Iowa State head coach T.J. Otzelberger said. “We were careless in transition defense, we were not as locked in and we dug ourself a substantial hole.”
The opening four minutes saw neither team make a basket, an oddity for the powerful Cougar offense and Iowa State’s. Iowa State senior guard Curtis Jones was the one to get the zero off the scoreboard from mid-range.
Jones finished his final game at Hilton Coliseum with 16 points on 4-of-12 shooting, 2-of-6 from 3 and a perfect 6-of-6 from the line. He reflected on his final game at the place he called home the past two seasons.
“There were some times I thought about it,” Jones said. “But when the game was on, it was really just try to come back and win the game.”
The Cyclones built a lead, mostly due to the influx of turnovers BYU committed in the first half. The Cougars had nine turnovers in the opening nine minutes.
That total built up to 29 over the whole game, the most BYU had the entire season, and Iowa State had 34 points off of those.
“We turned them over more because we were playing faster, quicker lineups and we were able to pressure the basketball,” Otzelberger said. “The guys that we played in those stretches, they did a great job pressuring the ball and generating turnovers when we could, but we’ve got to do a great job finishing on the glass.”
While the smaller, speedy lineup did prove fruitful in forcing turnovers, it left Iowa State susceptible to the taller Cougars centers and forwards to grab rebounds with ease. In doing so, BYU outrebounded the Cyclones 52-24, with 35 coming on defense and the other 17 offensively.
It was a stark contrast to the way Iowa State forced BYU into a multitude of turnovers.
“It was [those] offensive rebounds that just killed us,” sophomore forward Milan Momcilovic said. “We turned them over a lot, but they killed us on the glass.”
When that started to take shape, BYU started to see its shots fall as the first half wore on, and ultimately took the lead 21-20 with four minutes left until halftime. That lead built up to nine points after a 7-0 run over the span of 46 seconds, and took a 33-24 lead into the break.
That momentum carried into the second half, and BYU slowly built up its lead. The largest deficit the Cyclones faced was 21 points with 13:16 remaining in regulation.
“It would have been nice to score more, but we can’t let that affect our defense,” Jones said. “Once they got it rolling, they really got it rolling.”
But Iowa State was not going to give up that easily. With the roaring Hilton crowd willing the Cyclones on, they used that energy to their advantage.
Iowa State went on a massive 17-2 run over the next six minutes and was right within reach. Another run later, this one 11-2 over a four minute span, brought the game within two with two minutes left.
“We felt the momentum change and the crowd was into it,” Jones said.
A few possessions later, Momcilovic nailed a three from the top of the key that tied the game at 66.
“It was pretty loud in there,” Momcilovic said.
But a tie was all the Cyclones could get, as in the final 17 seconds, BYU and Iowa State traded free throws and free basketball was on the way.
In each of the overtime periods, BYU got on the board first, and those deficits just brought the Cyclones back to where they were and what they had been doing all night long: trying to come from behind.
“That was the biggest thing,” Momcilovic said. “We were still fighting back in overtime, kind of just felt like an uphill battle the whole time.”
Junior guard Tamin Lipsey came alive in overtime, scoring six of his 15 points in those two five-minute periods. Junior forward Joshua Jefferson, who led scoring with 19 for the Cyclones, also scored six points in overtime and did the brunt of his work from the charity stripe, where he was 11-for-13.
Over the course of the game, and part of the reason the Cyclones came back but could not firmly take control, was because they went to a smaller lineup, using Jefferson down at the post, while senior center Dishon Jackson and senior forward Brandton Chatfield did not play for a long portion of the second half, nor any minutes in overtime.
With that, Iowa State ran with a six-man rotation for a large chunk of the night.
The smaller rotation saw Momcilovic and senior guard Nate Heise, who had four points and a team-high five rebounds, swap out the most.
Momcilovic entered when the Cyclones needed a basket. Heise came in when they needed a stop, usually when the game was tied or when Iowa State trailed by a point.
“He’s obviously a great defender, so having him on the defensive end really helped us,” Momcilovic said. “He made a couple big plays, a couple big turnovers that really helped us.”
It worked for a while, until BYU took the lead for good in the final seconds of the game.
“We weren’t being tough enough to get the shots we needed to be successful,” Otzelberger said. “We did things to put ourselves in tough spots, and that’s not a recipe for success.”
