Northwestern University Athletics
Purdue Primer
1/30/2015 12:00:00 AM | Men's Basketball
By Skip Myslenski
NUsports.com Special Contributor
Chris Collins channelled his inner historian. That is what he did Thursday afternoon while discussing his 'Cats, whose string of eviscerating losses grew to five last Sunday at Maryland. "The Bulls (of the early `90s) didn't become champions until they learned how to get through the Pistons. The Pistons didn't win until they learned to get through the Celtics," he said here.
"And they had to hurt, they had to sting. We won a national championship in 2010 (when he was an assistant at Duke) with a bunch of juniors and seniors, when they were freshmen they lost to VCU in the first round (of the 2007 NCAA tourney). Eric Maynor hits a shot at the buzzer. You're crushed, and then three years later you're holding the trophy up. You're not doing that without going through what they went through as freshmen. It's part of the process.
"It's not fun. No one likes to go through tough losses. But you have to learn how to win. That's what we're going through right now."
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Last Sunday, against 13th-ranked Maryland, the 'Cats were up 11 with 3:30 remaining and clearly well-positioned for an upset win. But then, inexorably, they made minor mistakes that proved to be monumental. They gave up an offensive rebound on a missed foul shot, which led to three Terp points, and another on a layup, which led to two more. They were hit with a ten-second call against the Terp press, which robbed them of a trip, and then turned the ball over against it, which led to a Terp layup. Even freshman point Bryant McIntosh, so brilliant throughout this affair, missed a front end with less than 30 seconds remaining, and finally senior JerShon Cobb failed to grab the rebound Dez Wells put in for the Terp game-winner. "He made a great play. Wells, he made a great play," Cobb would say Thursday when asked about that play.
"I felt we played not to lose, rather than to win the game. It's just a growing process," McIntosh would say of those final 210 seconds.
"I would agree," Cobb said when asked about that.
So how do the 'Cats break that cycle?
"You don't get put on your heels," said McIntosh. "Their press put us on our heels. We turned it over and now it became `We can't make a mistake' rather than just trying to win the game doing the things we needed to do. We were worried about the mistakes we were making."
"We've got to keep our foot on the team's throat," Cobb said to the same question. "We can't let up. We did that. We got hesitant a lot. We turned the ball over. We did everything right (for the Terps) to help them come back. We can't do that."
"I probably felt that a little bit," Collins later said when asked about McIntosh's observation. "The players are the ones who can tell you that even more. As a coach, I didn't feel that. But the guys on the floor are the ones in the moment and there's no question, human nature, it creeps in your mind. You're at the end of the game, it's a close game, you're thinking, `Oh, man. I hope we're not going there again.' You have to be tough enough to say, `You know what? We're winning. We're going to make the plays. We're going to get the stop we need. We're going to get the rebound we need. We're going to make the free throws we have to make.'
"I have to do a better job as a coach in helping those guys, in talking them through situations, and being better with them in the time outs and calm their nerves and get them in the right frame of mind. That's something I take personally because that's what I have to do to help them finish these games better."
And how does he keep them from playing not to lose the next time they are in a close game?
"You continue to be positive," Collins said. "You continue to reiterate to them that we're going to win, and that we can win. I think that's the thing that's great. Our guys have a lot of confidence right now. They know we're playing well. We're playing good teams and they know we're doing a lot right. I like that. Now, when we get down to that winning time late, that's where we have to gain more confidence. The best remedy is, you go out and do it.
"Again, it's frustrating. It hurts. We all sting. But you've got to be positive. To me it's part of some master plan that we're going to look back at and say, `We are what we are because of what we went through when we had to find out who we are as a team and how tough we had to be to win.'"
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It is counter-intuitive to think it. But as they prepare for Purdue's Saturday visit to Welsh-Ryan, the 'Cats are--as Collins said--a confident crew even after five straight enervating losses. "We've learned we can play with anybody," forward Sanjay Lumpkin said Thursday. "Obviously, losing these close games is heartbreaking. But it's given us confidence that we can play with anybody."
"It's tough. Somedays, you don't want to have anything to do with it. You've got to get away from the game," said McIntosh. "But then you go back and watch film, and you realize you did do a lot of things well. You just made some key errors at a point where you can't afford to."
"We have to make sure we do the things we've done to have us in these (close) games," said Cobb. "Purdue's a great team. They're tough. But we need to keep doing the things we've been doing."
"I've told the guys, `We're being tested in some way,'" Collins finally said. "Our resiliency. How much we're going to keep fighting. But the the one thing that comes out of it is how well we're playing. So the first thing is, we're playing really well. The second thing is we have to learn how to finish the games off. Certainly, in the last game, Maryland did some good things. But we gave them a lot of help. We could have done a lot of things better. If we made one more play, we could have won.
"So it's part of our growth. It's part of our process of learning how to win."
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