Men’s Basketball

The losing streak continues.

Northwestern (12-13, 3-11 Big Ten) dropped its sixth game in a row in a 59-50 loss to Nebraska (15-11, 5-10) on Saturday night in Lincoln, Nebraska. Senior forward Vic Law led the Wildcats with 15 points.

For two teams that have struggled to score of late — Nebraska hadn’t scored more than 65 points in any of its last five games, while NU has the second-worst scoring offense in the conference — both hopped out to a relatively solid start. Nebraska went on a 6-0 run early, but Law responded with a red-hot run of his own, scoring 10 points to keep NU within reach.

The shooting struggles that have plagued NU in its recent games were still painfully obvious, and the Cats managed only 2 points in the last four and a half minutes of the first half. The Cornhuskers took a 28-23 lead into the break.

After a quiet first half, Pardon opened up the second half with his second 3-pointer of the season and helped chip at Nebraska’s single-digit lead. But Nebraska’s Isaiah Roby exploded for tk points on the night and NU committed seven turnovers in the game’s latter half, maintaining the lead for the Cornhuskers, and keeping the Cats away from their first win since January 22.

Takeaways

1. Law kept the Cats alive on both ends. Law went off for 10 points during the first half, and by the break, had scored nearly half of NU’s total points on his own. He continued to keep the Cats in the game in the second, forcing turnovers and limiting Nebraska’s third-leading scorer, Glynn Watson, to just 10 total points. But his offensive performance wasn’t enough to propel NU to a win, but especially after four games with under 10 points in January, it was honorable.

2. Dererk Pardon didn’t go off. After he scored only 6 points in the Cats’ most recent loss to Rutgers, Pardon was expected to rebound with a big game against Nebraska. NU’s big man only scored two points in the game’s first half, and although he finished with 11 on 5-for-12 shooting, the Cornhuskers’ defense did a solid job holding him below his season average of 13.7 points. Pardon grabbed a team-high 11 rebounds, four of them on the offensive board, but he struggled to convert a handful of chances under the rim.

3. So it goes. For the fifth season in Chris Collins’ six-year NU career, the Cats have lost five or more consecutive Big Ten games. The only season exempt from that list? The 2016-17 NCAA Tournament season. The Cats have six games left in the regular season — including matchups against No. 20 Wisconsin and No. 12 Purdue — and with hopes for the postseason essentially gone, it’s going to be a difficult road to .500 for this team.

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