Northwestern University Athletics
The Skip Report: NC State Primer
12/3/2013 12:00:00 AM | Men's Basketball
Dec. 3, 2013
NUsports.com Special Contributor Skip Myslenski offers up a preview of Wednesday night's B1G/ACC Challenge matchup between Northwestern and NC State in Raleigh.
Drew Crawford asserts he will be there when the `Cats visit North Carolina State as part of the Big Ten/ACC Challenge. "I'll play Wednesday. I'll play Wednesday, yeah," he declared before a recent practice. His issue is a balky back, which bothered him last week, got worse as the team flew to Las Vegas for a pair of games, and then seized up after he took an awkward fall in the first of those games.
"It just locks up. It's a sharp, shooting pain through my back," he explained, which is why he missed the second half of that game with Missouri and the one that followed on Friday night against UCLA. But by Monday he was feeling frisky enough to say, "I just gave it a couple days to rest, let the spasms settle down, and I'm feeling better now."
"It's one of those injuries, when you have back spasms, it's hard to quantify, `Is it day-to-day? Is it weekly?'" said `Cat coach Chris Collins a bit more cautiously. "We're just taking each day as it comes. Hopefully we'll have him available Wednesday, but we're not sure yet."
THE `CATS were toppled in Vegas by a pair of undefeated teams, which dropped their own record to 4-4. Still, speaking of their 11-point loss to Missouri, Collins said, "I was very pleased. I thought we played a really good first half (which they finished up five), then Drew gets hurt. That took the wind out of our sails a little bit. He's our leader. He's our best guy. Then they hit us with that quick run to start the second half and we couldn't really recover."
The next night, playing without Crawford, they also couldn't recover against the 16th-ranked Bruins, who dashed off to a 14-1 lead and ended the evening a surreal 13-of-17 (76.5 percent) on their three-point attempts. "We were overmatched," Collins said of this game. "UCLA's one of the best teams in the country. They're big. They're athletic. They presented a problem for us every which way. They got off to a great start. I'm not sure I've ever seen a team hit 13 out of 17 from three. It's hard to do that in a gym by yourself, let alone game competition. We just lost to a really good team."
COLLINS, of course, is in his first season guiding the `Cats. That means, it should not be forgotten, that players he did not recruit are striving to master offensive and defensive systems that are new to them. But their game with the Bruins was their seventh in 16 days, which is not a schedule conducive to learning. "We've played so many games in such a short amount of time, we haven't had that much practice time and the thing that's been most effected by that is our defense. We're getting a lot of slippage with our defensive habits," explained Collins, who for all his emotion is also a hard-eyed pragmatist.
"You look at the way our schedule's been, you're in a tough spot as a coach. You can continue to drive them in practice and then have tired legs (in games) and be tired mentally. Or you can taper it down a little bit (in practice) with the hope of fresh legs, fresh minds. I always lean toward that. I always want fresh legs, fresh minds. But what happens is you get some slippage because you're not able to do the breakdown work everyday and, right now, all this stuff is new for all our guys. The habits aren't there, so we need to do it everyday.
"Being able to get back to the practice floor, get some practice days in, I think it'll help us because we've got to get much better on the defensive end. It wasn't our offense. We scored 80 points (actually 79) against UCLA. We had 39 at halftime against Missouri. Those are two really good teams. We're not going to win games if teams score 80, 90 points against us. It's just not going to happen."
HERE IS ANOTHER ISSUE that has bedeviled the `Cats through the first month of the Collins Era. They have gotten consistent performances from only Crawford, their leading rebounder (6.9 pg) and second leading scorer (14.3 ppg), and junior JerShon Cobb, their leading scorer (15.1 ppg) who put up 22 against both the Tigers and the Bruins. The rest of them, in stark contrast, have been very much like that little girl with the curl who, when good, "Was very good indeed,/But when she was bad she was horrid."
Take junior point Dave Sobolewski. In the Wildcats' Nov. 20 rout of UIC, he was 9-of-14 overall, 4-of-8 on his three and ended with 25 points; but in their two Vegas games, he was a combined 3-of-13 overall, 1-of-9 on his threes and totaled just 16 points. Or take sophomore center Alex Olah. Against UCLA, he had 11 points and seven rebounds in a solid 36 minutes; but a night earlier against Missouri, he had just three points and one rebound in 19 foul-plagued minutes. Or take sophomore guard Tre Demps. He was steady in Vegas, going for 11 against Missouri and 15 against UCLA while shooting just under 50 percent from the field; but in the `Cats Nov. 14 loss to Stanford, he was just 3-of-11 despite scoring 10 points. Then there are freshman Nathan Taphorn (11 points against Missouri, three against UCLA) and sophomore Kale Abrahamson (19 points against UCLA, none against Missouri).
This inconsistency, we wondered, just what kind of pressure does that put on Collins as a coach?
"We're still kind of figuring it out. Yeah, it's a good point," he replied. "We've got a lot of young guys. You've got three guys who have played in a lot of games and have won in the past and have been part of good teams. That's JerShon, Drew and Sobo. The other guys are all young guys, and I think with young players that's what you see. Lack of consistency. We've got to get more consistent production out of Alex. A lot of that sometimes has to do with early foul trouble. Taphorn's a freshman. Kale's a sophomore. These are young guys. They're figuring it out. But you're right. For us to get better and to take the next step as a team, we need more consistent performances from more guys than just Drew and JerShon."
HERE IS ONE LAST observation culled from the month just passed. The `Cat offense is now founded on spreading the floor and setting screens and cutting and slashing. Yet, just as it was when it was running the Princeton, it is most-dependent on jump shooting. "You're a product of who you have," Collins will say when this point is raised.
"We can't trade for Derrick Rose or Russell Westbrook. We are what we have. That's why we've got to find ways to get Alex in the post. We've got to get Drew in the post some. We've got to find ways to get to the foul line by different means. Driving. Posting. Because the fact of the matter is we're not going to get a lot of transition points with this team because we don't force a lot of turnovers and we don't run out that well."
To that point: Against Missouri his `Cats had just two fast-break points and against UCLA they had none.
ON THE ONE HAND, Collins, when asked what he has learned about his team through his first month with it: "What I really like about our team is we've showed we have a lot of fight in us. You look at that game in particular against UCLA. Your best player is out and they start the game up 14-1. A lot of teams would have said, `Hey, let's just get home. Let's pack it in.' Our guys didn't do that. They fought. We got back in the game. The rest of that half we played them even. They wore us down as the game went on. But there was a lot of fight in our group."
ON THE OTHER HAND, Collins, on Wednesday's game with North Carolina State: "We're going down there to get a win. We've lost two games in a row. For us, we're trying change a culture and trying to change the way we view things. It's nice to say you play hard and you fight hard and all that. But the reality is we've lost two games in a row. So we need to have a sense of urgency and a little bit of a chip on our shoulder. We need to get back in that winning column. That's what this is about."
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