This is a legit very good basketball team. Balanced scoring and Defense is what’s really impressive! Fun to watch.
Northwestern is Good
- Thread starter The Purple Knight
- Start date
In the past, this was a trap game. Beat a big team in a big game then fold to a lesser team. Raise your hand if you felt this game was always solidly in control.
I would have liked to see Boo sit early. These are games to start eyeing Clayton for next year. I would have put BB down too when it hit 35 pt difference. He’s the X factor and not replaceable.
Would have enjoyed 5 plus minutes of Clayton, Berry, Lang, Mart and Hunger.
I would've liked Boo to sit earlier too, but I liked the idea to keep Barnhizer and Langborg out there late without Boo (or Berry or Nicholson). Not just for next year, but the time will come this year when NU needs to win a game and Boo is out for whatever reason, and though the team didn't play great the last couple of minutes when the game was well in hand, they do need as much experience together without Boo as possible.
We need a lot of data before next season’s practices begin as game speed <> practice speed
Against any other program I’d agree with you. Against dOSU I’m glad Collins played Boo until he fouled out. It’s unfortunate he did otherwise we could have beat them by 40
I am amazed by how much better they are playing compared to a month ago. I think it’s a combination of good coaching, Barnhizer healing, Nicholson getting into game shape and in-team leadership, and I will take it. I thought it was the first game this year against a P-6 team that the defense dominated, which is a great sign.
Let’s give credit to the coaches too, this was around the time of year the team noticeably improved as well. They’re continuing to improve and develop within the season the last two years in ways that speak well to the coaches
NU played arguably its two best games of the year this week heading into the toughest game they’ll play all season. Good time to be clicking.
Also, we may not like it (I don’t), but these days margin of victory matters. It feeds into KenPom and the other predictive metrics that drive the NET ranking which is an input for seeding in the NCAA. Other teams with our record and our quality wins are seeded 2-3 lines higher than we currently are because (i) we had such a weak OOC schedule, and (ii) we beat a lot of very bad teams by relatively small margins like Jackson St, Binghamton, W Michigan, DePaul and of course the awful loss to Chicago St. and the 30 point loss to IL. Those are killing our predictive metrics for the year.
Beating OSU by 25 helped us jump from 58 to 47 in KenPom which is very nice and will help with that. Beating them by 35 would have been even better, worth something like another +0.7 and would get us up to 44 or 45. Again, I don’t like that it is that way because I appreciate good sportsmanship, but the ranking system they have set up incentivizes teams to go for blowouts.
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