With 4:30 remaining Sunday, junior guard Meshia Reed snatched the ball from Illinois guard Fabiola Josil and sprinted to the other basket. Reed went up for the layup, but Lacey Simpson caught up with Reed and blocked her shot. Northwestern regained possession after the ball went out of bounds, but 15 seconds later junior center Amy Jaeschke suffered the same fate, as her shot was swatted by Jenna Smith.
It was that kind of day for the Wildcats as they ended their regular season with an ugly 58-48 loss to the Fighting Illini.
“Illinois played a really physical game,” Jaeschke sad. “They made it hard to get off shots, and their defense was really great tonight.”
After falling behind 5-0 to start the contest, NU (16-13, 7-11 Big Ten) battled back to tie Illinois (15-13, 7-11) at 5 with 14 minutes left in the first half. That was as close as the Cats came in the contest. The Illini ripped off a 15-3 run and never looked back.
Poor shooting plagued NU in the first half, and the Cats went into the locker room with a 5-of-29 mark from the field, including 1-of-9 from beyond the arc. NU’s three leading scorers on the season, Jaeschke and forwards Brittany Orban and Kendall Hackney, combined for four points.
“We let them push us out tonight, dictate what we were doing on offense,” Hackney said. “That’s not what we normally do.”
Still, NU was able to limit Illinois defensively, something it couldn’t do in Champaign, Ill., when the Illini scored 43 points in the first half.
“In Champaign we basically FedEx-ed them our strategy and left them wide open,” coach Joe McKeown said. “Today at least we guarded them and we banged them.”
On defense NU held Smith to just three first-half points on 1-of-4 shooting. Smith went off for 28 points in the opening period of the team’s first matchup.
“She’s really athletic so it gives me a tough time,” Jaeschke said. “But I try to just use my strength against her athleticism to try to her match her defensively and offensively.”
The Cats cut the Illini’s lead to seven just after intermission, but Illinois went on an 11-0 run and held a double-digit advantage for the majority of the half. NU’s press fazed Illinois toward the end of the game, and after an Orban steal with three minutes left, Hackney drilled a 3 to cut the Illini’s lead to nine. With less than one minute left, Orban recorded another takeaway and freshman forward Dannielle Diamant nailed a shot from beyond the arc to pull the Cats within eight. But it was too little, too late for NU.
“We came up with a lot of scraps, and that definitely helped us gain some momentum back,” Hackney said. “Near the end we got two or three steals in a row, and that was a huge turnaround. But there just wasn’t enough time on the clock.”
Even with two losses to end the regular season, the Cats finished with the most wins by any NU team since 1997. NU is also tied with Illinois and Indiana for the eighth spot in the conference, but the Cats will lose tiebreakers with both teams. In all likelihood NU will be the 10th seed in this weekend’s conference tournament, which means it will face Michigan in the first round. The Cats have already beaten the Wolverines twice, and a third win would boost their postseason résumé.
“Hopefully next week will be good to us and March will be good to us,” McKeown said. “I like playing in March.”[email protected]
