To say the least, Northwestern men’s basketball coach Bill Carmody was less than pleased with his team’s performance Saturday night in its season opener.
After a 53-43 loss to Arkansas-Little Rock in which the Wildcats shot 29 percent from the field, the coach used his first regular-season news conference to rip his players, questioning their talent and desire.
It wasn’t even the fact that NU’s hoopsters were outscored by their football counterparts 61-43, but instead their total inability to accomplish anything in front of about 1,200 fans at Welsh-Ryan Arena.
“Well, probably not much different than last year, right?” Carmody said, comparing the performance to those of last season’s 5-25 team. “Really there was nothing out there that looked good to me.
“If I had five other guys, I would have thrown them in there, to tell you the truth. Because no one was interested in winning.”
The Cats did hold an early 6-5 lead, but a short jumper by the Trojans’ Laverne Smith with 13:09 left in the first half put Arkansas-Little Rock ahead for good. The biggest lead of the game came with 7:03 left in the second half when last year’s Sun Belt Conference cellar-dweller led 38-23.
“I don’t really like to compare it to last year because it’s so much different,” said sophomore guard Ben Johnson, who led the Cats with 16 points. “But I think there were a couple of times during the game where Tavaras (Hardy) and me and Winston (Blake) kind of looked at ourselves and said, ‘This reminds us a little bit of last year.'”
NU made a late run after trailing by 15, but it was much too little to overcome the Trojans’ commanding lead. The Cats didn’t score their 30th point until Collier Drayton sliced to the hoop and made a layup with 3:38 to go. NU’s 40th point came with less than a minute to go, on a Blake layup. After the game, Carmody addressed the team about its sudden success in garbage time.
“At the end of the games it’s easy to make shots. And that’s what I told them,” Carmody said. “Make them when it’s 16-12 and we’re losing. Make them when it’s 8-5. Don’t make them when you’re down 10 and it really doesn’t have much of a chance. Because a lot of bad guys make them and so you can’t be fooled by that. I mean, we were lucky to get 35 points.”
With little inside presence, the Cats had to shoot from the outside. Of NU’s 55 shots, a school record-tying 30 of them came from behind the three-point arc, and only six of those fell. In the first half, NU hit one of 15 three-point attempts.
Missing one of those three-pointers was center Aaron Jennings, who notched two turnovers, one rebound and zero points in 16 minutes. Carmody benched the big man for all but one minute of the second half, choosing to play the 6-foot-8 Hardy at center instead. Hardy fouled out with two points and five rebounds. Freshman point guard Jitim Young was NU’s top rebounder with seven.
“We really didn’t go into (the game) thinking we’d shoot all these threes. That wasn’t the game plan,” Carmody said. “But there was just no presence at all in the lane and I don’t know what you can do about that — a couple of heart transplants, maybe.
“(Jennings) is not going to play unless he’s productive. And that just makes sense. So there’s no message being sent. The guys that can help you win can play. He isn’t helping us, so he’s out.”
Trojans coach Porter Moser — also coaching his first game at his school — soon realized that forcing the Cats to shoot from the perimeter would prevent his defense from being riddled by back-door cuts. As a result, the Cats didn’t hit a single back-door pass the entire game.
“We opened up in man then went to a zone and we tried to pack in a zone and force them to take those threes, try to contest them, maybe take some back-door cuts away,” Moser said.
Next up for NU is Maryland-Eastern Shore, which will visit Evanston Wednesday night. As Carmody said so pointedly, his team will need to bring a different attitude to the arena that night.
“It’s really a gut-check,” Young said. “We have to come out and play like we did the last three minutes for the whole game. I guess we just expected to show up and win, but that can’t happen.”
