Green Turns Purple Green in 65-62 Nailbiter
By Lake The Posts on
Man, I hate to think what coulda been with a healthy John Shurna early this season. NU rallies from 13 down with 3 minutes, but can’t wrap up key rebound, drop to 0-2 in Big Ten play.
Deep breath. We’re 2/3 of the way through our oppressive opening three Big Ten games and are 0-2. Northwestern nearly pulled off a comeback for the ages, but fell 65-62 as John Shurna hobbled valiantly, but just isn’t himself with a high ankle sprain. One of the nation’s premiere shooters went 1-11 from the floor (11 points) and with all due respect to Izzo and the Spartans it was hardly their “D” that held him in check. What a warrior. The guy entered the arena in a walking cast and gave it his all, but he just isn’t himself as the high ankle sprain lingers. I’m stunned he can even play with it to be quite frank.
For the second time in a week, Northwestern faced a Top 20 team and showed we’re not far away from playing at that level. Yet, in the end a loss is a loss and the Wildcats squandered a huge second half foul advantage and again failed to rotate well on defense to defend the “3″ which the Spartans ultimately used to break NU’s back. The ‘Cats were in the bonus with 13 minutes to go in the game while not even registering a foul on defense. The ‘Cats couldn’t capitalize on taking the ball to the hole and making it a FT shooting contest and for that I pin the blame partially on Carmody and partially on MSU’s abliity to adjust, sag and try to seduce us in to 3-point shooting.
Draymond Green, MSU’s true big, caused havoc and carried the Spartans in the first half (it seemed early like he might go for 40) and caused NU to collapse opening up the perimeter for guys like Summers to hit clutch 3s. Michigan State shot a paltry 6-18 from three, but many of them came down the stretch. However, the play of the night was like a tidy bow on the storyline. Northwestern down 63-50 with about 3 minutes to go went on a tear as Curletti drilled a 3 and Juice Thompson went nuts to help cut the lead to a 63-62 game with :30 to go. The ‘Cats fouled a gimpy Kalin Lucas who promptly missed the front end of a 1-and-1, yet Shurna’s ankle appeared to prevent him from really getting good lateral movement on Draymond Green who promptly grabbed the rebound and put in a lay-up to make it the final score. NU would of course get a chance to tie, but never really got a good look.
Drew Crawford showed flashes of freshman Drew Crawford as he got his mojo going with sweet shooting and led the ‘Cats with 17 points, 8 boards and 3 blocks. The silver lining in all of this is that we shot a miserable 32% from the floor (18-57) and a pretty shoddy 16-24 from the FT line and were in it. You simply can’t expect to beat the elite Big Ten teams when shooting so poorly.
I remain confident in this team – especially when Shurna regains full strength in his ankle – as our lopsided murderous schedule may have some jumping off the bandwagon. Please don’t. To the students – bravo. You looked amazing on TV tonight and Gus Johnson commented several times on the electricity you provided. This is the exact home field advantage we dream about in football and it is a difference maker for us at home. Keep the faith.
The Big Ten butcher’s knife continues with our next game on Thursday at Illinois (2-0 in conference after beating Wisconsin tonight). I’m praying we steal one there as we then enter our must win stretch of our schedule with Indiana (home), @ Iowa then a quick rematch with Sparty on the 15th and then Michigan at home before a non-conference SIU-Edwardsville reprieve. We HAVE to go 4-1 during that stretch in my opinion. Our schedule is favorable in February, but we’ll need to take care of business against every middle and lower tier Big Ten team along the way.
Silver Lining II
That St. John’s loss isn’t looking AS bad as the Johnnies upset #13 Georgetown tonight to move to 3-0 in Big East play. Justin Brownlee scored the game-winner with :10 left as they won their fifth straight and opened some eyes with a 61-58 win.
2011 News
Some interesting 2011 opponent news as in theory three of our opponents got a tad weaker today. We’ll go in to details tomorrow. Plus, we’ll comment on this article about Fitz;s challenging the players but not the staff as well. Pretty sad news that we lose stellar WR coach Kevin Johns to Indiana, apparently for money. Good night everyone.
New slogan for NU athletics……”Expect Close Painful Losses”……
Get it to marketing fast LTP
new slogan for NU Athletics….\Expect Close Painful Losses\
Get it to Marketing stat LTP
“Expect Close Painful Losses”
About right. Another day, another soul-crushing defeat for NU (well, maybe soul-crushing is a bit of an exaggeration, since this game probably shouldn’t have been nearly as close as it was). I will say this: after the MSU football game and tonight’s debacle, if I ever have to hear that horrible “go green, go white” chant in any of NU’s facilities again, I am going to get violent. Sadly, there is a 100% chance of hearing that chant at NU again, and I’m sure next time I’ll just sit and stew like I always do.
cant read, cant write!
“NU would of course get a chance to tie, but never really got a good look.”
It was an exciting comeback, but I think you gloss over an important point in the line listed above. Carmody had TWO timeouts left at the end of the game and didn’t call one when MSU went up by three after the free throw rebound and basket. He should have set up a play to give us a real chance to tie the game. Then, we did have the chance to draw up a play, it was pretty awful. Granted, there were only 0.9 seconds left, but Izzo had to be laughing at how easy it was for his players to defend our final inbounds.
Just a shame because the players never quit. It’s only two games so I’m willing to give Carmody a chance, but if he has more performances like tonight, I really hope Dr. Phillips waits before signing him to an extension.
Great turnout by the student section. Hopefully it can continue once students have studying to do…
@rick – I’m all about transition 3s. It is something everyone practices. After the basket I have no problem with the no TO call, assuming we’re prepped for finding our guy who can get open. I know others feel differently.
In the entire game were we ever ahead? Ever? This is classic NU basketball. I have sat through almost 5o years of this. It never changes.
Bet you guys are fairly sick of MSU at this point.
I will try to ‘come in peace’ without leaving in pieces.
Although it’s like I ate 75 bags of Olestra Chips every time that “Commercial’ featuring the 2008-2009 NU @ MSU bball commercial comes on, so I know what the pain is like.
That was an annoying ass game from both sides, MSU refusing to bust the game wide open when it had it’s chances, especially right before the half allowing a 9 point lead to fall to 4. A bunch of VERY crappy bounces for both teams. And the mega ‘false hope’ comeback by NU.
That is the worst defensive NU team I can remember in some time, rebounding is tough out of a zone, but that was amazingly inept at times yesterday. Maybe Cobb being a frosh and Shurna being gimped up had something to do with it, but man that was bad. The trapping element of the zone seemed to help a bit later on though. Good work by the ‘masked man’ (please tell me that is not a permanent mask) on the block with those lefty runners.
As outstanding as Green was most of the game, man was he sucking it up down the stretch, that tap in was huge, but it should have never come to that. It’s like a WR making a routine play into a circus catch because he didn’t make the easy catch the first chance he had.
13pt lead with multiple Final Four experienced upper classment guards, it’s over right?
Nah man, Nah we don’t roll like that… Hand away 4 points on run out steals, Front ends of one and one’s, then the inevitable MAKE SHOTS 3′s falling, water torture…
It’s great to win, but MSU does this to it’s fan base CONSTANTLY, rarely does it bite them in the ass in basketball.
I hope nobody is pleased with the refs. What a sham. Call like 95% of the fouls on MSU for the first 30mins of the game, then just invent crap to call on NU late in the game to try to “even things up”. I think about 7 fouls were committed the whole game that needed to be called. Piling more incompetence onto incompetence doesn’t make it any better zebras.
@ st8ofmind:
Good win for your squad last night, and I think your summary is pretty accurate. I’m a much bigger football fan than basketball (and my lack of basketball knowledge betrays this), so I’ll leave the in-depth analysis to others. However, you’re right and it’s no secret that this NU team is a mess on defense. Not only that, but last night they looked beyond sloppy offensively, as well. Yes, a lot of this had to do with the fact that Shurna is only operating at about 40% right now, but our other scoring threats–Crawford, Thompson, Mirkovic (the big man with the mask)–need to show discipline and step up. It is my biased opinion that this team can win with with a gimpy Shurna, but it would require a maturity among the supporting cast that I have not seen this season.
I don’t watch a great deal of basketball, but I think I watch enough to know that we take an inordinate number of desperation/ill advised shots, even in the paint (in the rare event that we venture there). It was borderline embarrassing at times yesterday. We don’t take care of the ball, and we seem to go for the lower percentage shot when the option of a higher percentage shot is there for the taking. Does that make any sense, or am I way off? I don’t know. It’s too early to raise the white flag, but at this point, despite the fact that this is perhaps the most talented NU basketball team ever, I’m not seeing a whole lot of improvement over what I’ve seen the past 10 years as a Northwestern fan.
That is the highest ‘ceiling’ I’ve seen for any Northwestern team that I can remember.
They have a fairly legitimate one through five, all of which fit together nicely and would play on any virtually every other Big Ten team. Some good scrappy guys off the pine too. I can’t remember NU having that many athletic guys that also fit the system well.
I think nearly everything NU is running right now hinges on Shurna opening things up for others, and he was physically unable to do so last night. I thought NU did a very poor job of hitting the guys that posted up after their back cuts failed to work. At least in that case you can work inside out after a post up and collapse most if not all of the defense. They should especially work on posting up Crawford as he’s physically able to post up most wings I’d suspect, and I’d have Shurna make the entry pass to help cut down on ‘help’ off of Shurna.
I have a couple of criticisms for both teams last night…
MSU settled for way too many corner threes against NU’s 1-3-1. Our bottom guy is Juice, for cryin’ out loud. All 5’8″ of him. MSU should have been lobbing the ball to the basket all night to let Roe go crazy on Juice. And the lobs were there to be had…NU wasn’t exactly pressuring the ball aggressively.
And I’m still confused why NU can’t seem to design a play that gets a quick and good look. There were two scenarios I found particularly disappointing:
1. We were down three with 30 seconds to go. Our three best offensive options (Crawford, Shurna and Juice) all are most comfortable shooting threes. Yet we come down and run the Princeton motion for 20 seconds, only to get Juice a two-pointer with 12 seconds to go. Decent result, but NOT ONCE did we even come close to getting any of our shooters open for a three (or even run a discrete action that looked like it could yield an open three).
2. With .9 seconds to go, we have the ball under our basket, down three. One of our best shooters, Juice, is inbounding. Shurna is up top awaiting some kind of action. Crawford is solo in the opposite corner. The Shurna action was vanilla and totally ineffective. Crawford fakes up to the top of the key — but there’s no screen coming so clearly just a v-cut — and then fades back into the corner. Juice passes the ball 30 feet to the corner, but Summers is still right with Drew, and forces Drew into an improbable catch falling out of bounds and impossible shot from behind the backboard.
I certainly hoped we’d be able to create more than that…
Just thinking about NU basketball in general….
Why do we keep Carmody around? Over his tenure there have been some talented players but he’s been nothing better than mediocre over the last decade. The goal for NU basketball has to be making the tournament. Carmody has been close (kinda) to achieving that goal twice but has always fallen short. He IS a decent coach but he’s not the right guy for NU. He has had long enough to prove he is the coach that can put us in the tourney. Compared to Fitz who seems to do more with less, Carmody manages to do slightly less than you’d hope with the players he has. As long has he’s the head coach, NU will not play basketball in March.
I used to think Bienen was keeping Carmody in a job (Princeton guys looking out for each other), but Schapiro is president now and Carmody is still here. I don’t get it. In the past 10 years there hasn’t been anyone for hire that could do a better job than Carmody? Just like football we’ve got to expect more than mediocrity and stop making excuses if we seriously want to become more competitive.