Iowa State Cyclones guard Curtis Jones (5) brings the ball up court against the Iowa Hawkeyes Thursday, Dec. 12, 2024 at Carver-Hawkeye Arena in Iowa City, Iowa. © Julia Hansen/Iowa City Press-Citizen / USA TODAY NETWORK via Imagn Images
IOWA CITY — Curtis Jones hoisted the shot, then held his breath.
The Iowa State guard wasn’t sure if his late 3-point shot Thursday at upset-minded Iowa would go in or bounce off the iron, but once he saw it tumble through the net, he smiled.
And silently heaved a sigh of relief.
“My first time here, my last time here,” said Jones, whose 23-point performance helped the No. 3 Cyclones complete an 89-80 comeback win over the Hawkeyes at Carver-Hawkeye Arena. “Happy to go 1-0 here, so that’s all I’ll ever know.”
ISU (8-1) trailed or was tied for the first 36:55 of the game — until Nate Heise’s deft cut to the hoop met an assist from fellow forward Joshua Jefferson to give the Cyclones’ a 76-74 lead with 3:05 remaining.
ISU added to its newfound lead after that and held Iowa (8-3) without a field goal for one six-minute stretch in the second half. The Cyclones trailed by as many as 13 points in the first half, but chipped away to keep it a two to three-possession game most of the way.
“I kept looking at the scoreboard, and not to say my math is great, but every time I looked up there it just seemed like we were always down six, and now we’re down eight,” said ISU head coach T.J. Otzelberger, whose team won in Iowa State for the first time since 2014, when former star Georges Niang famously (or infamously, depending on one’s rooting interest) blew the fans at Carver a kiss. “You felt like there were times we were playing how we needed to play offensively, but we weren’t as focused on the defensive side as we needed to be.”
That’s because the Hawkeyes rarely missed an open shot for roughly two-thirds of the game. Iowa drilled six of its first seven 3-point attempts and shot 61 percent in the first half en route to a 44-37 lead. But the Hawkeyes’ hot shooting eventually fizzled out, as they made just 32.4 percent of their shots in the second half, while going 4-for-15 from beyond the arc.
“That’s one of the best teams in the country, if not the best right now,” said Iowa’s Payton Sandfort, one of six Hawkeyes who scored in double figures. “And we were right there with them for a long time. Props to them for the way they made plays.”
Owen Freeman led Iowa with 16 points, Josh Dix added 14 and Sandfort scored 13.
ISU’s Jefferson — a transfer from St. Mary’s — notched his third straight-double double with 19 points, 10 rebounds and an ISU-career high seven assists. Fifteen of Jones’s game-high 23 points came in the second half. He sank three of his four three-point tries in the final 20 minutes — as did fellow guard and Ames native Tamin Lipsey, who finished with 13 points, six rebounds, three assists and three steals.
“I made the comment a few days ago about him being a superhero,” Otzelberger said. “And the shots are great, but there are so many plays, hustle plays, rebounds, loose balls — I felt like he was so tenacious in that department. Those plays they’re not 50-50 balls, and they weren’t tonight with them. He commanded and demanded those.”
Heise contributed 10 points and six rebounds while hitting a pair of key shots down the stretch. His tip-in of guard Keshon Gilbert’s missed layup with 7:44 remaining tied the score at 66-66. And his shot that gave ISU its first lead drew loud chants of, ‘Let’s Go State,’ from a large contingent of Cyclone fans who journeyed east for the first Cy-Hawk game decided by single digits since 2017.
“The whole game we were trailing and we just needed to get over the hump,” Heise said. “It felt like were six (or) four points away the whole time and then when we finally took the lead, you felt kind of a sigh of relief. … We just had a lot of guys who made big plays, and that’s what it comes down to.”
As for Jones, eight of his 23 points came when ISU trailed by eight points or more.
“They just keep coming, and coming and coming,” Jones said of Iowa. “Like every shot it seemed like it was going through the net perfectly.”
Until it didn’t. The Cyclones teetered on the brink of defeat several times while taking the Hawkeyes’ best shot. But they somehow found a way to win — the mark of a team capable of making a Final Four run in March.
“We were playing back on our heels,” Lipsey said. “And then later on, we were trying to put them on their heels, make them make a play, speed them up a little bit. We were able to do that.”
