No. 5 Iowa State won its season opener by 39 points, but that doesn’t mean coach TJ Otzelberger is fully satisfied.
The team’s mindset is to always find areas to improve, and that will be the case as Iowa State (1-0) gets a shutout against Kansas City (2-0) on Monday night in Ames, Iowa.
“Yeah, we’ve got to do a better job of playing simple basketball,” Otzelberger said.
“I think, offensively, there are times when the ball gets stuck to one guy and we take it away a lot,” he said. “There are games that we will finish with both hands. We (would get) a rebound, pull it from someone else’s foot or be careless. The things that were sloppy are not the same as how it happened. We play.”
Despite that imperfection, Iowa State cruised to an 83-44 victory over Mississippi Valley State in its opener last Monday. Keshon Gilbert scored 17 points, Tamin Lipsey added 16, and Joshua Jefferson and Milan Momcilovic added 10 apiece to lead the Cyclones, who shot just 23.8 percent (5 of 21) from the field. arc.
That’s an area Otzelberger will look to improve against Kansas City.
“I thought we looked good,” he said. “Curt (Jones) and Milan, they looked good. Overall, we want to shoot the ball better than we did. But I didn’t think it was because we didn’t have the beauty. It was because they weren’t there. ‘fall for any reason.’
Kansas City will look to challenge the Cyclones after opening their season with back-to-back, double-digit victories. The Roos posted a 124-36 win over Kansas Christian in their most recent Friday night game.
The 88-point margin of victory against an NCCAA Division II program is the largest in Kansas City program history. The previous record was a 73-point win over Bacone (111-38) on November 18, 2019.
“I thought we put ourselves in a position early on to win and not worry about winning the game,” Roos coach Marvin Menzies said. “That’s something we didn’t do in our last game (a 91-68 win over Hannibal-LaGrange last Monday), so I felt like we took a step in the right direction.”
Anderson Kopp scored 22 points to lead Kansas City on Friday. He added five rebounds and three steals.
Kasheem Grady II will also look to keep the Roos hot. He scored 21 points on 7-of-11 shooting from the field, including 5 of 7 from beyond the arc, against Kansas Christian.
Menzies said his team needs to focus on a tough test at Iowa State.
“The train has left the station now,” he said. “So it’s rolling. We’re going to put this game behind us and focus on the next game.”
Menzies and Otzelberger share a connection: Both men were head coaches at UNLV. Menzies spent three seasons there (2016-19) and was quickly followed by Otzelberger (2019-21).
Monday will be the sixth meeting between Iowa State and Kansas City. The Cyclones are 5-0 in the series.
–Field Level Media
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