No one is picking the Northwestern men’s basketball team to win the Big Ten, but most are at least assuming that it can’t be any worse than last season.
The 1999-2000 Wildcats endured one of the worst seasons ever in the Big Ten, having two players quit, going 5-25, going 0-16 in the conference, having five more players leave, having a lawsuit filed against the coach, and then having the coach himself jet for the NBA within a month and a half of the season.
Wounds heal with time, but those inflicted by merciless opponents last year may take a little longer than normal to get better.
Enter new coach Bill Carmody from Princeton, who brought with him a staff of former Ivy Leaguers, and the rebuilding — or simply building, based on how few returners there are — finally begins.
An analysis of Carmody’s crew should begin with age, simply because the Cats don’t have much of it. With two juniors — forward Tavaras Hardy and guard Collier Drayton — the only players on the team with more than a year of college ball, the Cats will likely have less experience than any team it faces all year.
As a result, Carmody has been frustrated in the preseason and in practice by the shakiness of some of his team’s most basic skills.
“You take one of our guys and you put him in the corner and he’s wide open in practice and you say, ‘Take 10 shots.’ And if he hits four of them or three of them in practice, it doesn’t matter what you’re doing system-wise,” Carmody said. “And if you can’t dribble the ball more than two or three times with your left hand or your weak hand, it doesn’t matter what system you have. What we’re trying to work on is just trying to improve the guys we have on their basic fundamental skills, dribbling the ball, shooting the ball, passing the ball.”
Carmody’s willingness to acknowledge some of the team’s shortcomings without reaming his players has given them the freedom to learn without fear, which was not the case under vitriolic former head coach Kevin O’Neill.
“People aren’t too worried about making mistakes,” Drayton said. “If you made a mistake last year, you were going to get yelled at and hear everything in the book. This year, we’re just able to play basketball.”
Aside from the questionable fundamentals, Carmody has had to deal with a thin roster. The coach has shown willingness to play only eight of his 13 players in the exhibition season.
The starting lineup has been set for much of the year, with Carmody playing Hardy surrounded by three sophomores in guard Ben Johnson, forward Winston Blake and center Aaron Jennings. Freshman point guard Jitim Young rounds out the starting five. Young will be expected to shoulder a big scoring burden — he was NU’s leading scorer in both exhibition games with 21 and 17 points. Johnson led last year’s team with 11.6 points per game.
Other than those five, only Drayton, sophomore forward Jason Burke and freshman guard Ed McCants have seen any playing time.
“Right now there’s a dropoff (after the first eight),” said Carmody, noting that freshman Drew Long is making some positive strides in practice. “When there’s no dropoff then they become part of the rotation. And I’d prefer to have not just eight guys but nine or 10 guys. Sure, that’s what you look for. So we’re just waiting to see who comes through.”
It is still unknown how much Burke will be able to contribute off the bat since he is still getting back in shape after offseason knee surgery that held him out of practice until early this month. McCants also has struggled at times to adapt to the college level.
“I think Ed McCants will step up, Drew Long, and myself,” Burke said. “I’ll get back into shape so you’ll see eight to nine guys in every game.”
So Carmody will have a difficult building job ahead. If he can get his six freshmen into the mix, and get his elder statesmen to embrace the offensive principles he brings to NU, Carmody will likely be able to get his team into position to surprise a few people by the end of the year. But make no mistake about it, he has a number of obstacles to overcome before his highest aspirations can ever be realized.
“We’re not even at the point of getting it or not getting it, the way I look at it,” Carmody said. “We’re not sound fundamentally. Our dribbling is bad, we’re not a very good shooting team, we’re not a very good passing team.
“There’s a lot of room for improvement. I think there can be some big jumps because some of these guys, it doesn’t look like have been taught anything coming out of high school. And that’s scary. So I think there should be some time during the year where there should be some big improvement if we’re working hard and working on the right things.”
