Field Level Media
Dec 29, 2020
The No. 10 Iowa Hawkeyes returned to the win column Tuesday when they defeated the No. 19 Northwestern Wildcats 87-72 in Iowa City.
Jordan Bohannon led the Hawkeyes (8-2, 2-1 Big Ten) with 24 points on 7-for-11 shooting and added five assists and five rebounds. CJ Fredrick had 19 points and Luka Garza followed with 18 for Iowa, which was coming off a 102-95 overtime loss at Minnesota on Friday.
Pete Nance scored a career-high 21 points for the Wildcats (6-2, 3-1).
The big differences between the teams over the first 20 minutes were turnovers and second-chance points.
Northwestern had nine turnovers compared with four for Iowa, with the Hawkeyes scoring nine points off those giveaways. The Wildcats went scoreless off Iowa's turnovers.
Iowa also had eight offensive rebounds and scored 11 second-chance points while Northwestern had only two and three, respectively.
The result was that despite shooting 50 percent from the field, the Wildcats took 12 fewer shots than the Hawkeyes and were down 45-36 at the half.
Nance and Fredrick lead led their teams with 17 points in the first half, and each shot 3-for-4 from deep.
A couple of 3-pointers from Chase Audige and another triple from Miller Kopp cut Northwestern's deficit to two early in the second half.
Northwestern later trimmed the lead back to three points with 10:41 left in the game, but Iowa went on an 8-0 run to go up 71-60 with 7:55 left.
Other than a Nance jumper that cut the deficit to nine points for a few seconds, Iowa led by double digits the rest of the way.
Bohannon caught fire in the second half to drive the Hawkeyes' strong finish, scoring 19 points in the second half and shooting 5 of 6 from beyond the arc.
Garza, a National Player of the Year candidate, had his streak of 18 straight games with 20-plus points in conference play snapped.
--Field Level Media