CHAMPAIGN — If there is a silver lining in Northwestern’s sobering 88-63 loss at No. 20 Illinois on Thursday night, coach Bill Carmody is having trouble finding it.
And he’s not just being pessimistic.
In a game where Illinois broke its own field goal percentage record, shooting a steep 70.5 percent from the field to silence NU’s 34.3 percent, there’s not much for Carmody to work with.
“Well, not much competition out there tonight,” Carmody said. “They played extremely well, and we had something to do with that. We were unable to stop them.”
The Fighting Illini (13-3, 3-0 Big Ten) wasted no time in avenging their loss to the Wildcats at Welsh-Ryan Arena last season, which marked NU’s (9-4, 0-3) first win over Illinois since 2004. The Illini shot 18-for-22 from the field and were firing on all offensive cylinders in the first half. NU’s defense switched several times between its patented 1-3-1 zone and a man-to-man matchup in hopes of containing the hot-handed Illini, but to no avail. Illinois senior guard Demetri McCamey went 2-for-2 from behind the arc and 2-for-3 from the field in the opening half.
“We just got off to a bad start, mainly on the defensive end,” senior point guard Michael Thompson said. “We just did a terrible job of containing them on our matchup and our 1-3-1.”
But McCamey wasn’t alone. Illinois was scoring at whim from the perimeter, knocking down 6-for-7 of its three-point attempts in the first half.
“It turned into an offensive clinic because everybody was shooting pretty well,” McCamey said.
He was being generous.
The Cats were hard-pressed to stop any Illini player. In the first half alone, Illinois’ bench pitched in 14 points – a far cry from NU’s two.
“We definitely wanted to shut down McCamey,” Thomspon said. “But we wanted to shut down all of their guys and slow them up, make them run their half-court sets.”
The sole hope for an NU comeback came when junior forward John Shurna, whose performance has suffered since he injured his ankle almost two weeks ago, nailed his only three of the night, momentarily silencing a packed Illinois crowd.
The Cats then went on a 7-0 run to narrow the gap, but that didn’t last long; the Illini closed out the half 47-24.
“Our main goal was that we just wanted to keep fighting and chip away at that lead,” Thompson said.
The second half offered no such luck for NU, and Illinois’ only let-up came when its reserves hit the court.
Shurna played just three minutes in the second half, heading to the bench with a season-low seven points.
With Shurna not putting up anything close to his usual 22 points-per-game average, NU searched for other options. The most viable threat to Illinois’ solid defense was freshman guard JerShon Cobb, who pitched in a career-high 18 points.
“Our kid, Shurna, is limited right now,” Carmody said. “When you have a team and someone is down a little bit, somebody else has to pick it up and fill in for that. We weren’t really able to find anybody to do that.”
NU is now winless in Big Ten play, after opening up against three-consecutive ranked opponents. Shurna has not been totally healthy for any of NU’s conference matchups, but Carmody said the Cats will have to start finding other ways to put up points.
In NU’s narrow 65-62 loss to No. 20 Michigan State on Monday night, that option was Thompson, who almost single-handedly led the Cats on a 12-0 run in the last four minutes. The senior pulled through again at Illinois, pitching in 15 points.
But against an offensive powerhouse like Illinois, it was simply not enough. NU will continue to look for solutions when it returns home Sunday to host Indiana.
“We’re just going to flush this game and get rid of it,” Thompson said. “You know definitely it’s going to be a long ride back now that we lost like this, but luckily we get to come back Sunday and play a game.”
