This may not be a popular thing to say, but I would take Coble over Stack. And maybe Tavaras over Goode.
Charles matthews
- Thread starter Windy City Cat Fan
- Start date
This may not be a popular thing to say, but I would take Coble over Stack. And maybe Tavaras over Goode.
I think this is a sad, but very accurate reflection of how below average the NU basketball program has been over the years. This "all-time" team named above has only one legitimate NBA player on it (Billy McKinney), and one border-line All-American (Esch), and nobody that any average basketball fan would have ever heard of if they weren't NU or Big Ten fans. Final Four? This team would be fortunate to make the NCAA tournament.
Basketball is such a game of individual stars. To win the NBA championship, typically you have to have at least two great players, often three. To make the Final Four, typically you've got to have at least one first-round NBA pick, and often two or three. The Cats? Well until they start recruiting future NBA players, they will continue to be "a nice" team.
You don't watch enough basketball. Or maybe you watch too much NU basketball.
Also, McKinney is probably too old to meaningfully contribute to a college basketball team.
He was not going back to the beginning of the program; he was just going back to the 1970s. We had a number of NBA players before that. Is it really a surprise that NU basketball has been below average in the last 40 years or so considering most of that period was our athletic Dark Age. The name does not apply to football only; basketball was woefully underfunded.
Absolutely no surprise, I have lived through the "Dark Ages" of NU athletics. My point is that even though things have improved with the basketball program over the last decades, there still is a long way to go before NU is more than a decent basketball team.
Esch was a consensus 2nd team All-American (hardly seems "borderline") and would qualify as the 1st round draft pick you said they would need. Shurna was an honorable mention (that's borderline) all-american as well and the NCAA's 3 point shooting champion.
The collection of talent listed above (I'd include Coble - hell of a player) isn't necessarily final four caliber, but fortunate to make the NCAA tournament? I believe this team would be a perennial contender for the BIG title.
Certainly nothing to brag about considering this is an all-time squad, but I believe your assessment to be quite wide of the mark.
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I don't the logic here trying to qualify Esch as a first round draft pick when he was, in fact, a second round draft pick.
No logic, just my memory letting me down. I swore Esch was the 29th pick - aka the last pick of the 1st round. Actually the 34th pick, a high 2nd rounder as you pointed out.
That said, I feel like the rest of my post had merit. Esch singlehandedly had NU in the bubble mix for a good chunk of the 1998-99 season. Surround him with legitimate BIG players in Shurna, McKinney, Juice, Jitim, Crawford, and Coble...
...hell of a 7 man rotation right there.
For the record, it's doubtful that the 1967-68 team would have made the NCAA Tournament even if 64 teams had been selected. NU was 8-6 in the conference, 13-10 overall. They played six games against good or very good teams: Marquette, Louisville, Ohio State, Purdue (twice) and Iowa. They won three of the six, but also lost to several poor teams, including Ohio U. (7-16), Colorado (9-16), North Texas (8-18) and Minnesota (7-17).
The 1958-59 team holds up a lot better, and NU had legitimately great teams in the 1930s. Still, you'd have to go back at least to Eisenhower's presidency to find an NU team that would have made the NCAAs even under today's expanded tournament.
Yet I think they would get destroyed by all-time MSU, all-time OSU, all-time IU, all-time Purdue, and so forth, even if the all-time teams were drafted from the same era.
I agree completely and tried to imply that sentiment in my response to Idaho. I simply disagreed with his notion that such an all-time NU team would be lucky to make the tournament.
I agree with this also. I think an all time NU team would be comfortably in the top 25 any given year, maybe somewhere around 15 or so, though not a top 4 team.
That 58-59 team with Rucklick, Jones, Warren, Mathis and Johnson would have made the "Dance". They played and beat very good teams.
I'm a 1960 graduate of Michigan State, so I saw that NU team play (including West Virginia in the Stadium), grew up in Thornton Twp. and got to see Joe Ruklick up close in Champaign in the 1954 State Tournament and saw Nick Mantis and Floyd Campbell of East Chicago Washington play many times. I guess I could answer you two ways. First, the 1959 team could play with anyone in the Big Ten. I guess if you could say MSU was the best in the last five years and played like the 59 State team, NU would be the equivalent of the present day Indiana's, OSU's, Wisconsin's, or Purdue. Now if you were comparing them to present day players you obviously would have a different story, but I have to tell you that starting five at Northwestern in 1959 were very good players. The best four teams in the Big Ten in 1959 were MSU (champions), Indiana (runner up), Purdue, and NU. NU was recruiting hard and in the right places then.
First, there were not the 350-400 D 1 teams back then. The power of NCAA BB was in the major conferences much more than it is now. Second, that was the top half of the conference, an area we have not visited lately. Finishing in the top half of the conference back then was very good and likely a top 25 type team. That is not saying that the team back then could compete with todays teams as play and rules have chanced
Thanks for the details. I had Johnson as the other guard but you are right it was Campbell, still think that Jonson was the guard coming off the bench, right?
Starting forward Phil Warren suffered a broken arm in the second game of that Big Ten season (with the team off to a 2-0 start). Otherwise, we might very well have won the Big Ten which is what it would have taken to make the dance back then. The triple ot win over Jerry West's WVA team was indicative of how good that team was and I believe they were pretty highly ranked until Warren went down.
