Men’s Basketball

Northwestern won its fourth straight game Tuesday with an 85-48 win over Division II Lewis at Allstate Arena.

Senior guard Bryant McIntosh led the Wildcats (9-4, 1-1 Big Ten) with 24 points, including a career-high six 3-pointers. Senior forward Gavin Skelly tallied a season-high 15 points as well, and junior center Dererk Pardon also hit double-digits scoring.

After the game, coach Chris Collins praised his team for not overlooking Lewis (4-8) in advance of Friday’s road trip to No. 17 Oklahoma.

“A team like Lewis, if you’re not ready to play, they can really expose you,” Collins said. “Our guys’ defense overall — holding them to 48 points, 31 percent shooting — that was the real story of the game.”

Junior forward Vic Law missed the game with an upper-body injury suffered in the second half of Saturday’s win over DePaul. Collins said Law wanted to play but wasn’t medically cleared to do so, and will hopefully return by Friday.

NU got off to a slow start, missing its first five field goal attempts, and trailed until a McIntosh floater five and a half minutes into the game. McIntosh recovered from a 2-for-17 shooting performance against DePaul with a spectacular offensive showing Tuesday, looking confident and backing it up all over the court.

“I shoot way too much to continue to shoot (that badly), so I was just trying to keep my confidence and … believing in myself,” McIntosh said.

The Cats then quickly pulled away from the Flyers, with a Scottie Lindsey three-pointer extending the lead to double digits and a Pardon dunk stretching it to 20 just about two minutes later. They led 49-22 at halftime.

The second half began with sophomore forward Aaron Falzon’s first three-pointer since the Valparaiso game, but NU played a less dominant frame overall, outscoring Lewis only by 10 after the break while the bench units received plentiful playing time. Collins said he was pleased to get players like sophomore guard Isiah Brown and freshman forward Anthony Gaines more than 20 minutes each.

The Flyers played some sloppy basketball, committing 17 turnovers, and the Cats made them pay dearly for it by scoring 34 points off those turnovers. Offensively, NU struggled from deep early on and clearly made it a priority to get more open 3-point looks, a goal at which they succeeded as the night wore on.

“We were playing out of the post tonight, which was good — something we have to continue to do a better job of,” Collins said. “They were doubling Dererk, he was kicking it out, we were getting ball rotations.”

Lewis’ leading scorer this year, forward Delaney Blaylock, was held to just 6 points. The Flyers were playing their second game in as many nights and, being a Division II team, were not expected to be competitive in Tuesday’s game.

The announced crowd of 5,126 fans was sent home happy when junior walk-on Charlie Hall made a free throw in the closing minutes — his first career point.

Next up, the Cats will play their toughest opponent in weeks in the Sooners, who have a 9-1 record and boast arguably the most impressive freshman guard in the country so far in star Trae Young.

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