Two-and-a-half minutes into the second half of last night’s contest between Northwestern and No. 2 Michigan, Wolverine point guard Elliot Cadeau threw a lob to forward Morez Johnson Jr. from half court.
Johnson Jr., an Illinois kid himself who played high school basketball in Chicago, is 6-foot-9 and spends most of his time on a basketball court above the rim.
Yet Cadeau’s lob was too wayward for even him to handle, and Northwestern true-freshmen point guard Jake West corralled the rebound. West delivered
a laser to Nick Martinelli, who had slipped behind the Michigan defense and now had nothing but daylight separating him and the rim. He threw down a two-handed dunk that extended Northwestern’s lead over the No. 2 team in the country to 12.
Martinelli, who is six games away from securing his second-consecutive Big Ten scoring title, has worn the hurt of this wayward season more than anyone. After an upset loss to Rutgers in early January, Martinelli told reporters that the season’s trajectory was especially hard to take “because both years where I’ve been the leader, we haven’t been able to win.”
He is this team’s elder statesman, a veteran who paid his dues as a role player during both Northwestern victories over No. 1 Purdue in 2023. This moment, this 12-point lead against the No. 2 team in the country, was his.
As the ball hit the floor, Martinelli swung on the rim for an extra half-second, basking in a giddy student section that had been itching for an opportunity to lose its mind.
Last night, for one fleeting, flickering moment, Northwestern basketball was fun again.
Wildcat fans have been tortured by close losses, ranging from the painful to the inexplicable. Northwestern made one field-goal in the final eight minutes of a five-point loss to Virginia in November. The ‘Cats led by 15 at one point against lowly Rutgers and had possession up by one with nine seconds remaining.
And last night, Northwestern ballooned to 16 with 14:22 to play. From that moment onward, the Wolverines outscored the hosts 45-17. Michigan scored on an unfathomable 21 straight possessions until a wayward pass from L.J. Cason with 1:13 remaining. The visitors won by double-digits, 87-75.
This Northwestern basketball season has chewed off and spit out joy with all the glee of a toddler stomping on ants.
Inside NU’s Matt Campbell asked Chris Collins point-blank how he would fix this propensity for blown leads, and the 13th-year head coach bit back with some uncharacteristic petulance.
“Well tonight, probably recruit Yaxel Lendeborg, Roddy Gayle [Jr.] and Trey McKenney as a McDonald’s All-American,” Collins said. “[Aday] Mara, 7-foot-4. Probably just recruit those guys, and we’ll be alright.”
Last night didn’t provide any new information on this team. Northwestern’s recurring problems reared their head in that second half.
The ’Cats are too small, too poor shooting the basketball, too young. Lendeborg, Mara and Johnson Jr. owned the glass in the second half, rendering moot a gutsy Northwestern effort on the glass with a combination of size and athleticism that we’ve never seen in purple and white.
Northwestern could not buy a bucket. The ‘Cats finished 6-of-25 from three after making four of their first five shots from behind the arc.
Inexperience. Miscues on defense. All of it.
Martinelli himself had one of his worst halves of the season after that dunk to go up 12. He was 2-of-12 from the field, living and dying by mid-range jumpers off the dribble, a shot that he hasn’t hit with consistency for the better part of the last two months. He finished with 18 points on 5-for-22 shooting, his second worst field-goal percentage of the season.
“They’re just throwing bodies at [Martinelli],” Collins said postgame. “They’re leaning on him and holding him and grabbing him. And he just keeps playing, and he keeps fighting.”
The crowd was a major topic of conversation last night, both for the expectedly strong contingent of traveling Michigan fans and the less-expectedly lame first half showing from Northwestern students. Perhaps sensing the school’s growing apathy towards its now 10-15 men’s basketball team, Northwestern sold a portion of tickets in the student section to the general public. I don’t have the numbers, but the last time I remember that happening was when Caitlin Clark and Iowa played in Evanston on Jan. 31, 2024.
Yet that Martinelli dunk was a throwback to the Welsh-Ryan of two years ago, in all the best ways.
The back-and-forth between Michigan and Northwestern fans throughout the entire second half was created a phenomenal environment. For all the hemming and hawing as to Evanston’s problem of road-fan takeovers — Michigan head coach Dusty May called last night a “home game” — the dueling crowd-pops provided by the 50-50 split is unique and legitimately cool. “Let’s go Blue” and “Let’s go ‘Cats” fought hard last night, and it was goddam loud.
As Wildcat Report’s Louie Vaccher put it last night, anyone who has watched this team all season was just waiting for the shoe to drop. And of course, it did.
But in a lost season for Northwestern, that brief moment is something worth holding on to.
