In another road loss for Northwestern, it’s deja vu all over again

The Wildcats are 0-7 on the road this year. Those seven losses all have striking similarities.

I thought I knew how this article was going to go. After Northwestern went 10 minutes and 45 seconds with only one made field goal, and was still tied with Washington at 16, I knew exactly what my reference was going to be.

This game was good old-fashioned Chris Collins mudball. Collins would be ejected about five and a half minutes after Angelo Ciaravino’s free throws tied the game up with nine minutes to play in the first half, it seemed pretty clear the game would be a slugfest. That meant — or at least I thought it did — it was time to bring out the Shawshank Redemption reference.

Northwestern was about to crawl to victory through 500 yards (40 minutes) of crap-smelling foulness (some of the ugliest offensive basketball I’ve seen this year) I can’t even imagine, or maybe I just don’t want to.

Well, that game against Washington can be described with a quote from Ellis Redding. But it’s not the quote about 500 yards of foulness. It’s this one:

“Let me tell you something, my friend. Hope is a dangerous thing. Hope can drive a man insane.”

Hey, speaking of insanity — everyone’s heard what the real definition is. Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. And as soon as the Wildcats leave Evanston, they’ve been doing the same thing over and over again. Northwestern has played seven road games this season, and all seven have been losses. Six of them have been by single digits.

Let’s rip those band-aids off again, shall we? How about the Dayton loss where Northwestern shot 5-for-20 from three-point range, led by 10 with under 11 minutes to play, and let the Flyers shoot 69% as a team after halftime? That game was merely a precursor of things to come. The Wildcats got a masterpiece of a game (32 points, 14 rebounds) from Nick Martinelli, but the other four starters combined for just 18 points on 6-of-23 shooting. Angelo Ciaravino was the only other Northwestern player in double figures.

Then, of course, there was the chicanery in Carver-Hawkeye Arena. I got to write about that game, the same way I wrote about the neutral-site loss to Butler a week or so prior. Looking back at my writing, I didn’t fully put that game on Josh Dix’s miracle heave. I instead noted that Northwestern had trailed by 17 at one point in the game, stormed back and took a lead with about three minutes to play, then ran out of gas.

Sound familiar? It should, because it’s almost exactly the same script we saw in Seattle last night. It’s also similar to the script the Wildcats were handed against Penn State on January 2. I was also “lucky” enough to cover that one. (Hey, to my editors, maybe we should stop putting me on all these road games that end in agonizingly close fashion? Just a thought.) That game, yes, was marred by some of the shoddiest officiating we’ve seen in the Big Ten all season — and there’s been a LOT. It was certainly a ref show in State College, but the refs didn’t hold Northwestern to two points in the first six minutes of action. They also didn’t let Penn State get 15 second-chance points (Washington scored 14 last night).

The Purdue and Illinois games were respites to some extent, but the Illinois rematch did end up finishing as just a nine-point game. Against Purdue, Northwestern didn’t get to the eight-point mark until the 13:48 mark of the first half. Against Washington? The ‘Cats didn’t get to that illustrious total until the 11:57 mark. The Illinois game was worse. Northwestern hit eight points at the 8:39 mark, by which point the Wildcats were already down 12 anyway.

So, Northwestern’s road games seem to be plagued by some combination of horrid shooting, slow starts, poor clutch execution and extremely questionable officiating. So which one of the fearsome four plagued Northwestern in the Washington game? Try ALL OF THEM.

We’ll start at the beginning, with the slow start. The Wildcats canned two of their first three shots, then proceeded to miss nine of their next 10. That’s the 10 minute, 45 second stretch I mentioned at the top. It was only by sheer defensive grit (and some excellent free throw shooting) that Northwestern was even semi-competitive for the first 10 minutes.

Then the questionable officiating kicked in. Washington went from up six to up 12 in a 25 second span after Chris Collins was suddenly handed a pair of technicals in rapid succession by Jeffrey Anderson and unceremoniously tossed from Alaska Airlines Arena.

Now, I haven’t officiated a basketball game since my friends needed some help for their rec league game about five years ago, but…that second technical seems rather quick. MAYBE Collins said something that crossed a line, or MAYBE Jeffrey Anderson is an awful official (check the comments on that tweet for proof).

The Wildcats then started the second half with some more poor shooting. Northwestern opened the final frame 1-for-6, by which point the Huskies had extended the lead to 13. After the 16:45 mark, the Wildcats would hit 15 of their final 24 shots. But starting the game 11-for-30 ended up dooming them anyways.

That became incredibly obvious over the final 2:19. After Nick Martinelli pushed the lead to four with 3:41 to go, Northwestern proceeded to miss four of its final six shots. Only one of those shots was in the paint, and it was a Martinelli layup that Washington had clearly deemed less threatening than a three-point attempt. Once again, the Wildcats simply dug themselves too deep of a hole to climb out of. Another road game, another poor shooting performance dooming Northwestern to a loss.

As Ellis Redding (in a universe where he’s slightly less foul-mouthed) would say, “Same old stuff, different day.”