Northwestern University Athletics
Penn State In Review
2/22/2015 12:00:00 AM | Men's Basketball
By Skip Myslenski
NUsports.com Special Contributor
Shep Garner dropped a three at 19:25 and then, less than two minutes later, Geno Thorpe dropped another. Now Penn State led the `Cats by six in their Saturday matinee at Welsh-Ryan and, quickly, Chris Collins turned to his bench. In went Vic Law and Nathan Taphorn and Dave Sobolewski and, just 26 seconds later, Law dropped a three from out high. "You have to give your team some life," he would later say about coming off the bench.
"I just felt like I needed to do something to lift my team's intensity and play as hard as I could. If one person plays hard, everyone seems to follow suit."
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This season has been a vertiginous voyage for Vic Law, who was considered the crown jewel of the `Cats freshman class. On occasions, for sure, he manifested his vast potential. But even he will say, "Each day, each game freshman year, it's been up-and-down."
"This is big-time college basketball," Collins will explain. "You're learning that, in order to be successful, you've got to work, and you've got to put in the time, and you've got to prepare, and you've got to be strong. To his credit, he's done that. He's been working his tail off. I've said all along, you guys would say, `What's wrong with Vic?' Nothing's wrong with Vic. He's just a young player finding his way."
He is a young player going through the process of maturing, a point Collins has made often this year about all of his freshmen, and last Wednesday night Vic Law took another step on that trek before the `Cats game at Minnesota. Here, in their final warmups, he was tightly locked in, so locked in that one of his assistants soon told Collins, "Vic's going to play well. It's by far the most serious and the best he's prepared for a game. He's not out there joking around. He's got a sweat going. He's shooting game shots. He's focused."
"Those are the little things," says Collins, "when I say they're starting to get it."
That attention to little things catalyzed Law, who that night dropped three threes early in the second half to give the `Cats the cushion they would ride to a road win. Then he and Collins talked. "OK," said the coach. "Are you going to get happy and excited by what you did and forget about what the formula is? Or are you going to stick with the formula?"
"Acting older than what I am," Law will say Saturday when asked about that discussion. "Being a freshman in the Big Ten, you really don't have too much room to play like a freshman. Early on, you have your time to make your mistakes, to-- not go through the motions, but to learn the process. Now I know everything. I've got all the ins-and-outs now. So my preparation and my work ethic are going to be at an all-time high at all times. That's the formula Coach Collins is really talking about.
"So I wanted to build off the last game. The last game and the game before (against Iowa) were really the times when I started to really lock in mentally and to start to prepare the way I wanted to play in a game, at the speed I wanted to play. The Iowa game, I got some early fouls and wasn't able to do as much. The Minnesota game, I was going to make sure no early, young mistakes were going to happen that wouldn't allow me to play and help my team win.
"The Minnesota game, it was really nice to hit some shots and play well and beat a really good team at home. But coming back home against a Penn State team that plays really hard, obviously I needed to step up even better."
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The Nittany Lions, after Law's three, hit another pair of their own, and now they were up nine with just 4:37 gone. "We were losing their shooters. We weren't communicating like we knew we had to," Sobolewski would later explain. "That was a big emphasis of ours as the second unit got put in the game. We knew we had to talk, and find the shooters, and close out beyond the three-point line. We eventually did that, and that's why they had trouble scoring."
That is exactly what the `Cats did and, quicker than a hiccup, the Penn State offense entered the polar vortex. After putting up those dozen points in under five minutes, it would score just 27 through this game's last 35. After knocking down four-of-their-first-five three-points attempts, they would hit just four-of-their-last-22. It would score not a single point off a `Cat turnover, would produce just four second-chance points, would--most significantly--get no help from guard D.J. Newbill, who entered this afternoon averaging a Big Ten best 21.1 points-per-game.
Here he would manage just six shots and would only make his final one, which came with 1:24 remaining in a game long-ago settled. "We call it awareness," Collins said of the job his `Cats did on him. "You have to have an awareness and it requires talk. So whether he was cutting to the middle, or cutting through to the corner, or out on top, we always tried to know where he was and point to where he was."
"He was frustrated, you could see. He was definitely frustrated out there," said his own coach, Pat Chambers. "And if he doesn't get 20 for us, it's going to be a tough night for us."
The `Cats, in stark contrast, got contributions from myriad sources as they ran away to a 21-point win. Sobolewski chipped in eight points in just 13 minutes and Sanjay Lumpkin provided the dirty work, grabbing six rebounds and making three steals in 20. Tre Demps scored 16, and Alex Olah scored 10, and point Bryant McIntosh, who was in the cross hairs of the Nittany Lions' defense, handed out eight assists against two turnovers. "I thought we did a good job on him. I thought we did a real good job on him," said Chambers, whose team limited McIntosh to just five points. "But he still had eight assists, which is pretty impressive for a young kid to understand, `OK. They're taking me out. Let me go make plays for others.'"
"I thought," said Collins, "his command of the game was outstanding."
But this game, in the end, belonged to Law, who was active and aggressive and an immutable force as he fulfilled his goal and built on his performance against Minnesota. He logged 31 minutes, the most he had played since the `Cats Nov. 17 win at Brown. He corralled 11 rebounds, three more than his previous high, and he put up 17 points, another season-best. He, most-impressively, went seven-of-12 overall (58.3 percent) and three-of-five on his threes (60 percent) after entering the game shooting just 36.5 percent overall and 28.1 percent on his threes. "I thought Vic Law was the difference," Chambers would later say.
"Certainly," said Collins, "this was a breakout for Vic Law."
"I was struggling with my shot," Law himself finally said. "Now Coach Collins and I are working on me staying on balance, on me going straight up-and-down on my shot, and I'm really confident I can make an open three if someone's going to leave me open. Teams scouting, before they could just say my percentage was low, so I was a non-shooter. But now I'm getting more confident and ready and able to knock that shot down.
"I'm starting to get used to college basketball now, so everything's a little easier. I'm starting to mature a little bit more."
