The Iowa State men got the new year off to a slow start trailing for three-quarters of the game before making a big comeback to down Yale 80-70 at Hilton Coliseum in Ames. Cyclone Georges Niang talked about the slow start.
“Like we are an old car man, it took us a couple of times to get started,” Niang says. He says it’s too late in the season to be starting that slow, but once they did things were flowing well and they were lucky to be home. Niang says they knew at halftime they could come back.
He says they knew they would start making shots, but they needed to bring energy and make some defensive stops. Niang says the defensive energy paid off. “When we pressed them and sped the game up…we got some turnovers and capitalized on that,” Kiang says. Cyclone coach
Fred Hoiberg agreed that they didn’t start with a great effort and turning it up was what turned things around. “We finally started playing with energy, and that’s the disappointing thing for me, is just the way we came out of the gate. You can’t do that. We wanted to come in here and jump on them,” Hoiberg says. He says it’s tough to beat anybody when you don’t come out strong.
The Cyclones controlled the boards again. “One of the positives that we’ve had in our non-conference schedule is our ability to rebound the basketball, we did a solid job of it,” Hoiberg says. He says the full-court press seemed to wear Yale down in the second half and his team ended up scoring 53 points in the second half.
Will Clyburn led the Cyclones with 17 points, Niang and Tyrus McGee each had 14, while Chris Babb, Melvin Ejim had 11 and Korie Lucious also got into double figures with 10. Iowa State is now 10-3 on the season and they have an 8 day layopff before traveling to Kansas to open the Big 12 season.