With less than six minutes left in the game, Ryne Smith found himself wide open. The Purdue guard knocked down the 3-point shot and put the Boilermakers up 6 points.
Northwestern was unable to overcome the deficit and failed to get a defensive stop until it was too late, losing 87-77 on Sunday. The loss highlighted the flaws NU was able to hide during its three-game winning streak with good shooting.
“We just weren’t getting stops man-to-man or zone,” coach Bill Carmody said. “We were trying to go back and forth, trying to figure it out, and we just didn’t seem to have much luck keeping our bodies in front of their guards.”
The Cats were outmuscled 40-28 on the glass while surrendering 15 offensive rebounds. The first half was the worst for NU as Purdue got 13 offensive rebounds while the Cats had 14 total boards.
The dominance on the offensive glass gave Purdue only nine second-chance points. However, the most critical of those points came with about three minutes left in the game when guard D.J. Byrd grabbed a rebound uncontested and hit a layup to extend the Boilermakers’ lead to 8 points.
“We talk about in the locker room about how we were being out-rebounded,” junior guard Reggie Hearn said. “We weren’t as good at rebounding in the 1-3-1 as we usually are.”
There were many examples of the Cats being outhustled on both the offensive and defensive end of the court. The most obvious illustration was in the first half when Purdue guard Terone Johnson saved a ball from going out of bounds and crashed over a table of courtside media. After lying off the court for about five seconds in pain, Johnson got back up and chased down an offensive rebound, eventually hitting a floater.
NU’s offense was very lethargic at times with the constant flow of the Princeton offense slowing down to a crawl. The Cats took many shots in the last 10 seconds of the shot clock and could not even get a shot off in the last seconds of the first half.
“It just didn’t seem like we were hitting on all cylinders offensively,” Carmody said.
Of course, there were times in which NU’s offense was running like the well-oiled machine it was during its three-game winning streak. The Cats hit 60 percent of their shots en route to 51 second-half points. However, Purdue shot 54 percent from the field and an astounding 64 percent from behind the arc, posting 56 points in the final stanza to outpace the Cats even when they were at their best offensively.
“I don’t think there was anything wrong with our offense,” Hearn said. “We were moving the ball around well and finding the open man. I think the issue was our defense and our rebounding.”
