By John Bohnenkamp

IOWA CITY, Iowa – Ben McCollum knows what he has for 35 minutes of a game.

Who is going to be on the court for the last five is what the Iowa men’s basketball coach is looking for this summer.

Depth isn’t a problem for the Hawkeyes coming off a 24-13 that ended with a spot in the NCAA Tournament’s Elite Eight. But there is a search for the go-to guys after the departure of guard Bennett Stirtz, a first-round NBA Draft pick.

“That’s a big deal, that last five minutes of a game, being able to control it, being able to finish it,” McCollum said during the Hawkeyes’ media availability on Wednesday. “But I like our length. I like our shooting. I like our energy. I like our attitudes. Hopefully, it continues.”

It’s a search that McCollum knows will take a while.

“Sometimes, it can take going into the season,” he said. “I’ve had teams that will be seven, eight games into the season and will be awful in the last five minutes, and then stuff clicks and it shows. You kind of have to let things naturally happen a little bit. I wish it could. We could just drive it, and everything looks really clean in 3D every single day. It’s just not that way. It’s not the way I coach. So, could be the first game, could be the second game, could be the third. We’ll have a plan for it. May not work, but then eventually we’ll find the right player.”

The Hawkeyes lost their three top scorers from last season. Stirtz is off to the NBA with the Oklahoma City Thunder, guard Tavion Banks is out of eligibility (maybe), and forward Alvaro Folgueiras transferred.

But this is still a deep team, although McCollum isn’t sure how deep he wants to go just yet.

“I think maybe my biggest (rotation) has been roughly nine or 10,” he said. “Probably 10, close to it. We have 11, 12, 13 guys who can play.”

Among other topics covered during McCollum’s 15 minutes with the media:

— The NCAA’s new 5-in-5 rule — five years of competition in five academic years — begins with this season. Which means players who finished their eligibility last season can’t be helped from it.

That hurts players such as Banks, who played two junior-college seasons, one at Drake, and one at Iowa.

“My understanding is those guys have to go to court essentially,” McCollum said.

Iowa still has one open spot on its roster. Asked if Banks could come back, McCollum said, “ I guess I don’t categorize anything because I don’t really have all the information to know. The understanding is that you have to get the judge to rule in your state. Now I don’t know if that’s totally true, but that’s my understanding. We also don’t see a lot of that from the Big Ten. There’s not a lot of litigation from the Big 10 that I’ve seen, but I might be wrong on that too. So I would say it’s probably ‘no comment’ on one way to get in because I really don’t know the information.”

— Iowa will play neutral-court games against Creighton and Alabama in Des Moines and Virginia Tech in Sioux City this season.

“People don’t want to do home-and-homes anymore,” McCollum said. “For the most part, it’s hard to schedule. So my thought was this — I can go to (a multi-team event) in California, an MTE in Hawaii, an MTE in Bahamas, which would be probably more fun for me. Or I can do it in the state of Iowa.

“Our fans are going to come watch (the games). They watch it. They like the product, and now we fill Carver for the Big Ten. So that was kind of the theory behind it. See if it works.”