WEST LAFAYETTE, Ind. — The game wasn’t ugly. It was Oo-gly.
With the Wildcats up 40-39 on Purdue with under a minute left — in the game, not the first half — NU missed the front end of a one-and-one trip to the foul line.
Three times.
Still, Northwestern pulled off its second road win of the Big Ten season, 40-39. No one scored in the last 1:55 as three field goal and four free throw attempts clanked out.
Pretty? Hell no. But that was exactly what the Cats had planned for.
“We felt the way we could beat these guys was to keep the score as low as possible,” NU captain Jitim Young said. “And we did that.”
And after giving Mackey Arena 40 minutes of ugly, the Cats left as winners. It was more than some could bear.
At the post-game press conference, Purdue sophomore Matt Kiefer sat moping, staring at the table in front of him, muttering about open shots and missed assignments. We were witnessing a defeated human being.
It was almost as sad a sight as the one on the court 10 minutes earlier.
Purdue had just finished producing its lowest point total in coach Gene Keady’s 24 years at the school.
The Boilermakers capped off their second-half onslaught of 19 points with two turnovers in the game’s final five seconds. Keady said he couldn’t even bring himself to read the stats sheet.
“I looked at the first two lines of it then I stopped,” Keady said. “0 for 7, 0 for 7. It’s ridiculous.”
The Boilermakers’ starting forwards combined to go 0 of 14 from the field and 0 of 10 from behind the arc.
The unsightly round numbers came as the result of 40 minutes of hard work from the Cats’ matchup zone defense. Sure the Boilermakers botched some open shots in shooting 34 percent from the field, but there weren’t many looks to blow.
NU wasn’t immune from the ugly bug either, committing 15 turnovers and finishing 0 of 6 from the line.
“We didn’t want to win, but they didn’t want to either,” Keady said. “It was like give away time, except we wanted to give it away more.”
Not exactly. The Cats’ defense was at its most ferocious in crunch time and Young put in one of the best eight-point, 33 percent shooting performances of all time.
A bit on the unsightly side, but Young’s defensive effort fueled the rest of the Cats, who in turn made sure the Boilermakers’ offensive possessions were the ugliest things on the court.
“That Young is the fiercest competitor in this League,” Keady said. “Him and (Indiana’s) A.J. Moye.”
It was hard to watch the Cats miss six consecutive three-pointers after building a seven-point lead by going inside. It was even harder to watch guard Evan Seacat miss the rim altogether on a layup attempt before the break.
In a game with the fewest points ever scored in Mackey Arena’s 36-year history, there were more than a few not-so-pretty sights.
But there is nothing Oo-gly about the Cats’ win column.
Deputy Sports Editor Nick Collins is a Weinberg junior. He can be reached at [email protected]
