There’s no way to sugarcoat it- Northwestern basketball fans needs to look ahead. Very far ahead.
“This is a process for us. I knew what I signed up for,” said Northwestern basketball Coach Chris Collins after his team was utterly dismantled by #4 Wisconsin 81-58 at home Sunday night.
“We’ve got to get old, and we’ve got to get experienced.”
Collins also brought up an article or a metric that said Wisconsin was the 11th most experienced team in the country, while Northwestern was the 320th (out of 351 total). KenPom states Northwestern is 318th, while Wisconsin is 33rd. So yeah pretty much.
“They’re not playing one freshmen, I’m playing five,” Collins said of Wisconsin versus Northwestern.
In other words, NU hoops fans need to emulate the title of a Green Day hit song from 1994 and take the “Longview.”
“bite my lips and close my eyes….take me away to paradise…..”
Big Ten basketball was brutally awful during the the non-conference slate. Therefore, you really can’t rule Northwestern out of too many league games in this winter. Still most projections see NU going somewhere from 3-15 to 5-13 in the league this season. Those forecasts, coupled with an RPI of 99, an expected final RPI of 126 (KenPom), a SOS of 90 and a KenPom currently at 146, it’s time to start looking beyond this year when it comes to Northwestern basketball.
The Big Ten is so bad this year that Northwestern only has two games left that could potentially be quality wins (1-25 at Maryland, 2-7 at Wisconsin) The Terrapins and the Badgers are their only remaining opponents with top 50 RPI
Don’t expect anything ground-breaking in 2014-15, and 2015-16 very likely won’t be a NCAA Tournament campaign either.
When 2016-17 gets here, things should take a major step forward.
There are a couple nice pieces in place already with freshmen big man Vic Law and point guard Bryant McIntosh. When they become juniors, that’s when NU could become a NIT level to tourney bubble kind of team. When they’re seniors, in 2017-18, then maybe the Wildcats will go dancing.
We can start the rebuilding plan around Law. Defensively, he’s already there. Offensively, he needs to catch up to where his D is. (And as we saw on the new Welsh-Ryan Arena video boards, Vic Law is an All-American when it comes to naming animated movies in under 15 seconds)
“Vic’s a talented player and he’s going to continue to evolve offensively,” said Northwestern Coach Chris Collins.
“We need his energy, he’s our most explosive athlete. We need him to start a game with energy and feed off him.”
Vic Law, a consensus top 75 national recruit with a four star rating, had one of his better games at Butler. That’s a good sign. If he is to be the kind of player who can routinely put up double doubles then he needs to continue that trend of playing his best ball against the toughest opponents.
McIntosh, like Juice Thompson, the greatest point guard in school history, had the ball in his hands since day one. So did Dave Sobolewski, but injuries took their tool on Sobo, and he’s had a very downward trajectory during his college basketball career. So now the offense runs through McIntosh, and it’s thought that the New Castle, Indiana product will possibly be a four year starter, providing a steady presence in the early years of Collins’ tenure.
Collins on McIntosh following the loss to the Badgers: “I thought he was fine. He’s the kind of kid who’s going to be down because he has high expectations for himself.”
McIntosh didn’t have his best game, but this was also the toughest assignment that he’s ever had as of yet.
Watch this space tomorrow for part two, where we focus on the Northwestern basketball class of incoming freshmen and look ahead to the nucleus that will form the 2016-17 Northwestern basketball season.
One of the re-occurring themes of Collins presser Sunday night was how the Badgers upperclassmen didn’t play when they were freshmen, and that they haven’t developed their bodies and their strength yet.
Here’s part two of this Northwestern Basketball evaluative feature, focusing on the incoming freshmen class.
Paul M. Banks owns, operates and writes The Sports Bank.net ,which is partners with Fox Sports. Read his feature stories in the Chicago Tribune RedEye edition. Listen to him on KOZN 1620 The Zone. Follow him on Twitter (@paulmbanks). His work has been featured in hundreds of media outlets including The Washington Post and ESPN 2