By JOHN BOHNENKAMP

It was a timeout that was needed, but Ben McCollum knew it wasn’t a good time for his voice.

Iowa’s 21-point lead from early in the second half of Saturday’s game against UCLA at Carver-Hawkeye Arena had dwindled to five with a little more than 11 minutes to play, chewed away by the Bruins’ 18-2 run that turned a rowdy crowd of more than 12,000 into one collective nervous murmur.

The Hawkeyes were in their usual huddle away from their bench — the on-court players on the chairs, their teammates surrounding them — but McCollum wasn’t about to invest his two cents.

“I was probably going to say something I didn’t want to say to the players,” McCollum said after the 74-61 win. “So then I stepped out of the huddle. Sometimes I do that.”

McCollum is in his first season as Iowa’s coach, and although the six players who came with him from Drake know him and understand him, there has been a getting-to-know-you process with everyone else.

Heading into the final 18-game grind of the Big Ten schedule, McCollum has a sense of the pulse of the Hawkeyes.

“Sometimes I say this stuff that I want to say to the players to the staff, so that I don’t say it (to the players),” McCollum said. “You just got to be careful with some of the younger kids. Bennett (Stirtz), we can be in a shouting match in the middle of the game and it’s going to be fine. Tavion (Banks), like those guys who have been with me, that doesn’t bother them.

“It’s just the nature of how I coach. I also know that I can’t do that with some of them. And so sometimes you’ve just got to let them have their conversation, and then they’ll come out and fix the problems.”

The problem eventually was fixed. Iowa closed the game with a 13-4 run, capped by Stirtz’s long 3-pointer in the closing seconds that came with McCollum’s urging.

The building of the McCollum era after the closing of the feistiness of Fran McCaffery’s run as coach has been fascinating to watch.

McCollum grew up a Hawkeye fan, and he wants this to work. Twelve thousand fans on a Saturday afternoon is great, he said, and he thought they played a crucial part in the win, but he wants more fans and he wants them consistently.

“I don’t look at milestones too much, but this is probably because it’s not necessarily something that is like a win-or-a-loss milestone, it’s more of a let’s-trend-this-direction,” McCollum said. “I’ll watch games on TV, and I’ll see crowds no matter what, and I think that’s what needs to happen, and has happened, at this point for all the programs here.

“That’s what Iowa is like, we come out and we support. That’s what I remember as a kid, that’s what it is, and so we appreciate it. We’ll keep fighting for them, and we’ll keep trying to prove it, and we hope that they continue to come out and help us win the game, because really, they were the difference in the game.”

“I think we just made people happy today,” forward Alvaro Folgueiras said. “We have a big privilege as  Hawkeyes, that is that we have the chance to make a lot of people happy every single night, and we take that responsibility, that privilege. and we are doing our part. They’re gonna do their part together. Today was a pretty good example of it.”

“I think we’ve had a good season so far, and hopefully, with their support, we can keep it rolling,” Stirtz said.

Iowa is 12-2 overall, 2-1 in the Big Ten, and in the national rankings. The team that McCollum assembled through the NCAA transfer portal in the spring has the chemistry that can sometimes never be grasped by rosters cobbled together from different backgrounds.

“Whether people think so or not, those guys had a lot of other options, including the six at Drake,” McCollum said. “That was a 31-win team. Alvaro had a lot of different options. A lot of those other guys did too. And they bet on our staff, and they bet on this place, and they want to flip it into what we think we can make it and they see it trending that direction. It doesn’t mean it’s going to just keep going that direction. There’s going to be some problems, there’s going to be downs, and there’s going to be some ups. But to see that is pretty cool, I think, for our guys that like, man, if we work for something, good things can happen.”

There have been a couple of downs — the opening Big Ten loss at Michigan State was ugly, the loss at Iowa State was frustrating — and the Hawkeyes had a response. This game had its own hills and valleys, and that roster that came together piece by piece in April and May continued to seem like a collective good fit.

“You recruit tough kids,” McCollum said. “I think the number one thing is, everybody talks about this culture thing, like you can just develop this immaculate culture. You can’t, you just really can’t. You have to get the right people. If you don’t have the right people, then you’re not going to be resilient.

“Now, you can strengthen some of that resiliency through some of our preseason (workouts), through some of our practices, that are very difficult. I put them in tough situations consistently, to develop that resiliency to understand how to respond. So, yeah, we’ve developed some of it. But more importantly, I recruit kids that are resilient, kids that are tough kids, and I’ve got a staff that’s resilient, and I just am the beneficiary of a lot of toughness. Then I get to look like I’m the one that did it. I’m not the one that did it.”

Photo: Iowa coach Ben McCollum draws up a play in a game against Western Illinois earlier this season. (Keith Gillett/Icon Sportswire)