For the first 35 minutes of Thursday’s game, the Purdue faithful were silent. Suddenly, with their team trailing by five, the visiting fans had reason to cheer.
Boilermaker guard Keaton Grant hit a 3-pointer to push the score to 57-52, bringing the game as close as it had been since early in the first half.
With that shot, momentum was slipping away from the Wildcats.
“They’re a top 20 team, so they’re going to make a push,” junior forward Kevin Coble said.
Northwestern held an 11-point advantage with as little as eight minutes remaining in the game. But No. 19 Purdue did not stop pushing until it erased the defecit and walked away from Welsh-Ryan Arena with a 63-61 win.
“We did a pretty good job of withstanding their push,” he said. “But we have to push back and make sure that we shut them down and put them away.”
NU would maintain its lead for the next four minutes, until Purdue hit a 3-pointer with 1:07 left to gain a 61-59 advantage. Once again, it was Grant who hit the shot.
Still, the Cats have no one to blame but themselves for the loss.
NU (8-6, 0-4 Big Ten) started the game on fire, grabbing a 10-point lead less than seven minutes into the game en route to a 34-21 halftime lead.
The advantage was built on the defensive end. Coach Bill Carmody doled out extended minutes to junior guards Jeremy Nash and Jeff Ryan. They helped NU force 22 turnovers and hold Purdue (13-4, 2-2) nearly 10 points below their season average.
“We worked pretty hard the last week,” Carmody said. “Everything we asked our guys to do they did. I thought we defended really well, we stole the ball, and executed very, very well on offense.”
While the Princeton offense opened abundant opportunities for the Cats, they couldn’t convert them into points. The last of these wasted opportunities came during the final minute in the form of a failed 3-on-1 fast break that could have iced the game for NU.
Further contributing to the Cats demise was their poor free throw shooting. Though the squad started the game by sinking seven of its first eight attempts, it finished 13-for-20. The team missed the second free throw on six consecutive trips to the line in the game’s final nine minutes.
“We just missed too many layups,” Carmody said.
Purdue closed out the last five minutes of the game the same way NU started it – on a 14-4 run. In addition to the Grant’s pair of 3-pointers, preseason conference Player of the Year Robbie Hummel followed up his own miss with an easy putback to tie the game at 58. It was the closest the game had been since the opening tip.
On the final play of the game, Purdue forward JaJuan Johnson got the benefit of a questionable foul call, and was sent to the free throw line with a chance to give his team the victory.
Though he missed a free throw in a similar situation earlier in the season, Johnson nailed both of them this time.
