By Ben LarrisonThe Daily Northwestern
Craig Moore entered the 2006-07 season as Northwestern’s top returning scorer. After having earned Big Ten All-Freshman honors the year before and fully recovered from an ankle injury, Moore was poised to help lead a young Wildcats team.
But after a solid non-conference showing, the sophomore fell into a horrific slump that has seen both his scoring average and his spot on the depth chart plunge.
“Sometimes you go through bad stretches, and he’s going through that right now,” NU coach Bill Carmody said. “He’s doing all the right things now, you know – he’s coming in, he’s getting extra shooting all the time – and so eventually it just gets to the point where he’s going to break free and he’s going to start making shots again.”
Though he’s still third on the team with 8.2 points per game, Moore’s productivity has plummeted over the last month. Since scoring eight points in the Cats’ victory at Minnesota, the Doylestown, Pa., native has just 20 total points in 138 minutes over the last seven games, including three outings without a field goal.
In NU’s past five games, Moore is a combined 3 for 24 from the floor, including a 3-for-21 mark from 3-point range, and one of those three field goals was the miraculous shot from near half-court against Penn State. At the time, Carmody said that he hoped Moore would gain some confidence from the game for the end of the Big Ten schedule, but since draining the circus shot he has made just one basket.
“You go through these kinds of things and you get confidence problems, so he’s got to overcome them,” Carmody said. “We’ve looked at technical stuff, and we’ve tried to correct a couple things – we think he’s pulling the ball back a little far – but for the most part it’s from the neck up right now.”
With Moore’s continued struggles, NU has lacked a legitimate long-range threat, shooting a paltry 27 percent from behind the arc against conference foes. That’s not to say Moore’s rivals on the depth chart have done any better: junior Jason Okrzesik and freshman Jeremy Nash are a combined 11-for-56 from 3 in 13 Big Ten games.
All of this comes in a year when Moore was supposed to be one of the Cats’ most feared offensive weapon. After averaging 8.1 points in the 2006 Big Ten season, the sophomore is down to just 5.4 points per conference game in 2007.
And as his scoring has declined, his minutes have declined, which Moore said has made it harder to break out of the slump. Still, Moore has tried to stay positive, confident that his shooting touch shall return.
“Sometimes you can’t shoot yourself out of it in a practice setting, you’ve got to shoot yourself out of it in a game situation,” Moore said. “And that’s what it looks like right now. So I’ve just got to keep shooting it, you know? I know they’ll fall, it’s not a big deal for me right now.”
Reach Ben Larrison at [email protected].
