By Paul M. Banks
INDIANAPOLIS- Northwestern won a national title in the 1930s, during the pre tournament era. They also won a couple Big Ten titles during that decade. Since then things have been pretty lean. But the color purple shines a little brighter today, as the Northwestern Wildcats added another win to their school record 19, downing the Indiana Hoosiers 73-58.
The 20-12 Wildcats will meet #2 seeded Purdue in the tourney quarterfinals tomorrow. Even if they pull that upset, the Cats still must still run the table in order to reach the first NCAA Tournament in school history. The Wildcats got off to a very slow start, and playing in front of a “hostile neutral crowd” (in Indianapolis, the Indiana Hoosiers have a “home court” advantage of sorts with the crowd so overwhelmingly red). Bill Carmody was his usual pithy self at the postgame presser.
“We had a shootaround today, where we made about 5% of our shots, so I thought we got all of our misses out of our system, but I guess we didn’t.” Carmody’s Cats won despite shooting just 7-31 from behind the arc. This game only furthered Carmody’s hate affair with the Conseco Fieldhouse rims. “I was thinking about Reggie Miller and how does he do it? That’s why I voted to keep it in Chicago all the time. Nothing against the city, it’s great, it’s close, it’s collegiate but I just hate the rims.”
Juice Thompson led the way with 16 points and four treys, including “the dagger” to make it 59-50 with just over four minutes to play. His three years here have been quite the progression, so I asked him about it. “It feels great to have 20 wins now, especially after going 1-17 (in conference play) when I was a freshman. We’re excited for what we’ve done so far, but we still want to work hard to add more wins to it.”