TEMPE, Ariz. – Bill Carmody isn’t in a position to dance around the subject. His team is struggling, and he knows it.
Fortunately for the second-year coach of the Northwestern men’s basketball team, eighth man Drew Long came to the rescue Friday night, giving the Cats just enough to score a 52-51 win over Louisiana-Lafayette in the first round of the azcentral.com Hoops Classic.
The sophomore guard scored eight points and drilled a 12-foot jumper on the right baseline with 10 seconds to go off of an assist by center Aaron Jennings. The Ragin’ Cajuns (5-5) had a chance to steal victory back from the Cats with an inbound pass underneath the basket with 3.3 seconds on the clock, but a swarm of Cats deflected the floater away from the hoop as time expired before a thin crowd of about 250 at Wells Fargo Arena.
“We ran a play for him but then they stopped it cold,” Carmody said of NU’s final possession, which resulted in Long’s game-winner. “And so we told him before that you have one timeout if you don’t like what you see but he got the ball. Haphazard stuff works often. He just made a good individual play.”
The Cats (8-2) were hoping to take advantage of the Ragin’ Cajuns defense on that final set, since they had been overplaying Long on the outside after he drilled two three-pointers earlier in the contest.
“They set up a play for me to go back door,” Long said, “and (the defender) played it real well. I just happened to get a step on him going back outside.
“Right place at the right time.”
NU will now play the tournament’s host, Arizona State, at 9 p.m. tonight in the final. Louisiana-Lafayette will meet Canisius, which lost to the Sun Devils on Friday, in the consolation game.
And if the Cats intend to take the tourney title by defeating a Pac-10 foe – they’ve already beaten an ACC team and a Big 12 team this season – they’ll likely have to put together a better effort than they managed Friday night.
Since defeating Kansas State soundly on Dec. 8, NU has struggled in four games, although it came away with wins in three of them.
“We haven’t played well since exams,” Carmody said, after watching both teams go 20 of 56 from the floor on Friday. “I don’t know, maybe they studied too much.”
The Cats did get an unexpected contribution from freshman Vedran Vukusic, who didn’t score but had an assist and two rebounds in eight minutes off the bench. Carmody had planned on holding him out until Big Ten play begins on Jan. 2, but the forward’s shoulder, which has been problematic all season, felt good enough in warmups to play in a reduced role.
Winston Blake again led the Cats in scoring with 17 points, but had to take 16 shots to get there. Five of the forward’s six successful attempts came from beyond the three-point arc. Blake also led the team with seven rebounds.
Without any semblance of an inside threat, NU was forced to shoot from the outside – more than half of the team’s attempts in the game came from three-point distance. The Cats got to the free-throw line just five times, and made only two of them.
Center Aaron Jennings, who started in place of Vukusic, was the Cats’ second-leading scorer with 14 points, but six of those came on three-pointers.
Carmody isn’t thrilled that his team has to resort to so many outside shots, but he said he’s aware that it’s his best shot to continue winning games, since the team’s post play has been non-existent.
“They really had us stymied for most of the game,” he said, explaining the reasons for resorting to the three. “That’s what we have, it’s our bread and butter right now.”