Northwestern University Athletics
Western Michigan In Review
12/21/2014 12:00:00 AM | Men's Basketball
By Skip Myslenski
NUsports.com Special Contributor
Chris Collins felt it in the locker room. There was an energy about his team on this Saturday afternoon and so he knew, just knew, that it was ready to play. Tre Demps too sensed a new mood as the `Cats awaited the start of their matinee with Western Michigan. "Today," he would say later, "was like the first game that we didn't feel alone at the beginning. Every game (previous) we started out alone and then once we got down, that's when we came together. That's not a good recipe. Today we were together from the jump."
But then came the jump ball that opened this game and immediately it echoed a familiar refrain. The `Cats struggled, missing five of their first six shots. The Broncos soared, scoring on four of their first six possessions. The 'Cats tarried, falling into an early hole. The Broncos spurted, going up nine on a Tucker Haymond three from the left corner, and now Collins quickly burned a time out.
"I wanted our guys to relax because we were playing well, we were playing hard," he would later explain. "We had talked about that. We hadn't gotten off to good starts, so we talked about our energy to start a game. And I felt it. I felt our guys were playing really hard. Then all of a sudden they hit those shots. With young guys, they can have a tendency to say, `Oh, man. This isn't working.' So the main reason for that time out was to let them know we are playing hard. We got to be a little bit smarter. We've let a couple shooters (open), they've hit some shots. Just relax. There's a lot of game left."
"I don't remember everything he said," Demps would say, thinking back to that moment. "But he said we're playing really hard and they just hit a couple tough shots. And to stay with it. And we believed it. He did a great job telling us that, and we stuck with it. Eventually we started hitting some shots and it became a ball game."
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Their regular season will include at least 1,240 minutes and 800 of those are still to be played. No one, of course, can predict what they will deliver. But the seven that followed this time out may well loom large in any recap of this year for here the `Cats, their noses bloodied, their knees buckled, refused to fall. They instead heeded their coach and stayed with it, and here are some relevant snapshots of what that soon produced.
Freshman Scottie Lindsey blocking a shot. Sanjay Lumpkin and Alex Olah doubling Bronco center Drake Lamont, whose outlet pass is stolen by Dave Sobolewski. Sobolewski stripping Bronco guard David Brown and beating Brown to the loose ball and outracing Brown down the court for a layup. Olah picking an entry pass by Bronco guard Austin Richie and then, after Vic Law misses the resultant fast-break layup, putting in the offensive rebound.
Now, at 8:34 of the first half, the `Cats were down just two and this game was finally and truly afoot. "Obviously, you're a little upset. You're down 11-2 and you feel like you came out ready to play," Demps will later say, thinking back once more to that time out. "But it's a carryover effect. You don't lose that edge when you start with it. Everybody stayed confident. We had great body language. We kept talking to each other. That was the difference. I think that's what got us out of that hole."
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The `Cats would have no one star in this game, which they eventually won by a half-dozen. But all of them stayed with it coming out of that time out and many of them took a turn in the spotlight. Demps would end with a team-high 17 points. Freshman point Bryant McIntosh would hand out eight assists and have no turnovers in 35 minutes. Olah would collect a dozen rebounds in just 25 minutes. Lindsey and Sobolewski, Nathan Taphorn and Gavin Skelly would come off the bench and combine for 25 points.
All of them helped deliver this victory and that was true too of their defense. Three days earlier, in their loss to Central Michigan, they had extended it to challenge the Chippewas' three-point shooters and had been cut apart by drives to the basket. Here they compacted it to prevent those drives and with that frustrated the Broncos, who entered this game shooting 49.6 percent overall (19th best in the nation) and 41.6 percent on their threes (16th best).
Their big gun was forward Connar Tava, who was averaging 16.1 ppg and shooting 60.5 percent from the field. But here he was challenged continually by the rotating cast of Lumpkin and Taphorn and Skelly, and he shot just 33.3 percent and finished with 11. "I was trying to stay above him," Skelly said of his work on Tava. "He likes to duck in a lot in the post. Staying above him really helped me out. You can't really let him get the ball. If he gets the ball, he's going to score."
Brown, another of their guns, entered averaging 13.4 points on 43.5 percent shooting. He would end with 11, but made just three of his 15 attempts (20 percent). As a team the Broncos would shoot just 38.8 percent, far below their season average, and after their fast start they would never again manage a flurry. "We made more of a conscious effort for this game to go back to the basics," Collins would explain. "It's got to be team defense."
That defense is what got the `Cats out of their early hole and then, with this one tied at 34 with 14:34 remaining, they unleashed their own flurry, which gave them a cushion they nursed through to this one's end. First came a Demps' layup and then an NBA three by Taphorn. Now, after a Bronco basket, Skelly hit a reverse layup with the shot clock nearing zero and finally Sobolewski dropped a pair of foul shots after a technical was called on the Bronco bench. With that they were up seven, and they would never trail again. "When you have a really young team, you worry about how they're going to respond when things aren't going so well," Collins would later say, thinking back not only to this game's start, but to their Wednesday loss to Central Michigan as well.
"One of the things we wanted to try to get back to is just the basics of what our program's about. That's fight. That's being tough. And that's battling on every possession. I thought we did that today."
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Now the `Cats have UIC on Monday and Northern Kentucky on Saturday, and then comes the start of their Big Ten season. That, of course, is a relentless grind and so, on this Saturday, Demps is finally asked if they have the identity needed to survive it. "I think today was a step in the right direction," he says.
"We still have a little bit of soul searching collectively (to do) to figure out who we are, what kind of team we're going to be. But today was a huge step in the right direction."
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