Northwestern University Athletics
The Skip Report: Nebraska Primer
2/6/2014 12:00:00 AM | Men's Basketball
Feb. 6, 2014
NUsports.com Special Contributor Skip Myslenski offers up a look at the role rebounding has played during Northwestern's turnaround over the last seven games.
The box score is passed out in the Wildcats' locker room shortly after each of their games and now, one competition just ended, another of a friendlier nature begins. Drew Crawford looks at his numbers, and so too does JerShon Cobb and Sanjay Lumpkin and Tre Demps and Kale Abrahamson. Bu they, here, are not looking for the number of points they have put up. They, instead, are more interested in the number of rebounds they have collected. "Drew always win. Drew and Sanjay," Cobb will say of this competition, and then he smiles. "They always steal my rebounds."
"That's what he's saying?" Crawford exclaims with a hearty laugh when that remark's passed onto him. "We aren't stealing his rebounds. We're just making sure we get that defensive team rebound. That's what it's all about. The rest is fun-and-games. At the end of the day, it's all about how many we have as a team. That's what's really important. But, yeah. We'll kind of mess with each other after games."
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The spotlight has focused on their penuriousness during the Wildcats' recent surge and there is good reason for that. In conference games only, they lead the Big Ten in scoring defense (63.3 ppg), are second in three-point field goal percentage defense (29.1) and are third in overall field goal percentage defense (.403). But also abetting them along the way has been their dirty work underneath, where even the smallest of them is now expected to fearlessly tread.
They, in turn, have had to redefine both themselves and the way they play their game. Demps, for one example, was never asked to rebound in high school. "Nah. Not really. I had guys who did that and I'd just go get the outlet," he says. Cobb, in turn, was asked to rebound some, but, says he, "My job was scoring." The same was true even of the 6-foot-7 Abrahamson, yet now that trio and Crawford and Lumpkin are every bit as important to the `Cat board work as the 7-foot Alex Olah. "One of the things we've talked a lot about as a team is we don't have those one or two guys who're going to get you 12-to-14 every night," explains Chris Collins.
"So for us to be a good rebounding team, we have to do it collectively. And a lot of times what happens is, especially when we're playing against big, physical teams, Alex is down there trying to block out and the other guys, they can come from the back side. Sanjay and Drew and JerShon and Tre, we've really talked to those guys about trying to get five, six, seven rebounds a game. I think it's really helped our team rebounding."
"It's not something we just talk about. It's something we practice, something we work on," adds Crawford. "So much of rebounding is just about desire, is about wanting to get the ball. That's something we've had an emphasis on and something that's been our mindset to do all year. So when it's something you focus on so much and something that you practice, it carries over into games."
"When you're playing against guys in the Big Ten, you're playing against some of the most-powerful, strongest players in the country," concludes Demps. "Olah's doing a tremendous job trying to block out one or two guys, so the guards have to do an amazing job of coming in and sweeping up the rebounds."
Has that been a hard adjustment for someone who never did it before?
"It just goes back to the mindset," he says. "It's something we need to do to win, so it's got to get done. It's just like any other job in the world. If there's a report that needs to be done, everybody's got to pitch in and do it. Same thing here. Rebounding's obviously been one of our deficiencies over the years, so everybody's got to pitch in and do it."
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The `Cats, as all attest, may have emphasized team rebounding from season's start. But the results of that were not manifest until they transformed themselves into that lock-down wrecking machine that has won five-of-seven heading into their noon meeting Saturday with Nebraska at Welsh-Ryan. Their metamorphosis, as we have reported, took place after they were embarrassed at Iowa in their third conference game, and so the testimony here shall focus on the before-and-after of that affair.
Overall, in those first three games, their rebounding margin was -12. Overall, in six of the last seven games (excluding the Iowa rematch), their rebounding margin was just -2.3, and that is not all. Crawford's rebounding average has risen from 3.3 in the first three games to 6.6 in the last seven; and Cobb's average has risen from 3.7 to 6.3; and the average of the quintet rounded out by Lumpkin, Demps and Abrahamson has risen from 14.3 to 23.7.
"You've just want to go get it," says Lumpkin. "I don't jump higher than a lot of people. You've just want to go get it. That's the main thing. Wanting to get it."
"A lot of it is desire. It is," agrees Collins. "There's a little bit of technique involved. But when it comes to rebounding, it's a lot of, `Do you want to go get the ball?'"
So, we suggest, the improved rebounding has gone hand-in-hand with the team's transformed character.
"I think so. I think so," Chris Collins finally says. "It's just been fun to see the guys, all of them, embrace those little things. Grabbing a loose ball. Getting a rebound in traffic. Not basing themselves on scoring or hitting shots. But more-so on what they're doing in terms of the dirty work."
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