Men’s Basketball

Struggling with turnovers and unable to stop a flood of second-chance points, Northwestern went into the huddle down 6 to last-place Rutgers with under eight minutes left.

Coach Chris Collins, often an emotional leader, was calm. His message was simple: “Let’s find a way.”

Collins couldn’t have foreseen that junior forward Gavin Skelly — who hadn’t made a 3 since Jan. 22 — would drain two triples to give the Wildcats (20-7, 9-5 Big Ten) some life. He couldn’t have foreseen that 6-foot-2 freshman guard Isiah Brown would get an offensive rebound to set up junior guard Bryant McIntosh’s go-ahead 3. He couldn’t have foreseen the Scarlet Knights (13-15, 2-13) would botch an inbounding play in the final 10 seconds to ruin their best chance at a late winner.

But his message still rang true. His team somehow did find a way, and NU scraped out a 69-65 win over Rutgers on Saturday at Welsh-Ryan Arena.

“(I’m) just really proud of my team the last eight minutes of the game,” Collins said. “That was a time where we could’ve seen a lot of panic, we could’ve really gotten down, and we just hung in there. … We had to dig down really deep and find a way and I’m really proud of my team for doing that.”

Sophomore center Dererk Pardon tallied 12 points and eight rebounds but made most of his impact in the game’s opening minutes. Instead, McIntosh shouldered the burden down the stretch, scoring 14 second-half points to lift his final stat line to 18 points on 6-of-11 shooting and six assists.

Junior guard Scottie Lindsey also made his return from a four-game absence due to illness, scoring 6 points on 2-of-8 shooting.

“Just having (Lindsey) out there brings a lot of confidence, eases a little bit of pressure off me,” McIntosh said. “He can space the floor, he’s a scoring option, he does so many things for us and it was nice having him back.”

For much of Saturday’s game, however, Lindsey’s return seemed like the only positive takeaway.

Rutgers held the Cats to just 7 points in the second half’s first 12 minutes to flip a 39-36 halftime deficit into a 52-46 lead, largely because of its dominance on the glass. The visitors cleaned up an incredible 18 of 36 misses en route to a 39-31 overall rebounding advantage and 34-22 scoring differential in the paint.

“We didn’t defend to the level that we needed to defend to for 30 minutes,” Collins said. “We’ve got to get back to playing our defense, we’ve got to get back to being a scrappy, blue-collar (team), which we were at the end of the game.”

The tide began to turn after the under-8 media timeout but the visitors still held a 4-point lead until Skelly drained a 3 from the corner with two minutes to play. That 1-point lead then held until McIntosh circled the 3-point line going left and nailed another shot from deep with one minute to go.

The Scarlet Knights nonetheless kept a sellout crowd of 8,117 tense to the very end, surviving even a costly turnover with nine seconds left to keep the score within one possession until Brown sunk two game-sealing free throws with 2.9 seconds left.

NU’s 20th victory ties the program’s regular season record for total wins set last season and pushes it even closer to its first-ever NCAA Tournament berth.

And even in a performance as ugly and unsettling as Saturday’s, McIntosh said he saw in the Cats’ late comeback another component of what makes this year’s team so different than its predecessors.

“We wouldn’t win a game like this in the past,” he said. “We felt like we shouldn’t lose this game, and that’s something that’s changed in the past year, year and a half. We felt that game belonged to us, that we were going to find a way to win no matter what.”

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