Northwestern University Athletics
Wildcats Gear Up For Exhibition Games
11/5/2002 12:00:00 AM | Men's Basketball
Nov. 5, 2002
EVANSTON, Ill. - After a 16-13 season last year that included a 7-9 mark in Big Ten play, the Northwestern men's basketball team has been generating excitement on the North Shore.
Through three weeks of practice, head coach Bill Carmody has publicly been preaching caution. This week, the first step toward recognizing that caution as optimism or realism takes place as the Wildcats host a pair of exhibitions in the span of four days.
The Northwestern men will play the EA Sports Midwest All-Stars Saturday night at 7 p.m., then take on the Northwest Sports All-Stars next Wednesday (Nov. 13) at 7 p.m. Both games will take place at Welsh-Ryan Arena.
"I'm always careful early on," said Carmody. "I look at last year and I see that we were 7-9 in the Big Ten, but that doesn't mean anything heading into this season.
"Don't get me wrong: I like the expectations. I think our players know there are expectations, too, but they're not feeling pressure and that's a good thing."
Carmody is pleased at where the program stands heading into the 2002-03 season. He has several seasoned veterans -- seniors Winston Blake, Jason Burke and Aaron Jennings, as well as junior Jitim Young -- who have the ability to bring along the younger players. According to Carmody, that makes for a good program.
"The main focus of the preseason is to find out how to integrate the younger guys," he said. "How will they fit in with the veterans? I think all of these new guys will eventually help us, but as you might expect some are progressing more rapidly than others and may be ready to go right away.
"Our older guys have been very generous in helping out the younger players, though, and that's a good feeling," he continued. "I think they know that if we're going to accomplish anything as a team, we need the younger guys to be on board."
One of the biggest components of the preseason has been scrimmaging -- lots of it. As the days have gone by, the stoppages have grown less frequent as Carmody lets the players figure things out for themselves on the floor.
"I like to scrimmage, because I think that's where you develop the balance between the half-court game and going full court," he said. "The last few years we may have been guilty of running too much half-court stuff, but we almost had to because we weren't a great rebounding team and we had to focus on getting back on defense.
"We were stopping them a lot at first, but we've let them go more as time has gone by," he continued. "Players have to play through mistakes and get into a comfortable situation -- they're going to make mistakes in a game, and things aren't going to stop so they can see what they did wrong."
A few other observations from Carmody entering the weekend:
"I think we're a little faster than we have been. Now we need to see if we can rebound so we can get out and run."
"We're still looking for depth ... will we be able to get up to nine or 10 guys who can get on the floor without us taking a drop in our overall play?"
"I'm a little concerned about our defense. We've been pretty good defensively the last few years, but we lost arguably our two best defenders in Tavaras Hardy and Collier Drayton so there are concerns at that end."
