After a series of injuries and ridiculous, hard luck finishes torpedoed Northwestern's men's basketball season they have managed to wash up on the shores of the first round of the Big Ten Tournament. This is a new indignity for Big Ten basketball fans. Until Kevin Warren got on a horse and wandered the West rounding up sports programs, it was the solemn and dignified right of every Big Ten team no matter how bad to get to go to the conference tournament and get to play at least one game, even if it is getting blown out in a sad afternoon spectacle. Now, the conference is so unwieldy that teams have to qualify for it, with the three worst teams eighty-sixed into a cold Midwestern alley with a series of byzantine tie breakers serving as a bouncer.
There is a certain romance to a conference tournament that promises teams that no matter how lousy they have been in the season they still had a chance to enter the NCAA Tournament by going on an insane run. For small conferences, this is a lifeline; I immediately thought about Bill Carmody's Holy Cross team making a run in the Patriot League tournament to somehow end up playing in the First Four. In the Big Ten, the fabled conference tournament run is more myth than reality. I cannot remember a single team winning the Big Ten Tournament that would not have otherwise qualified for the NCAAs. Very few bad Big Ten teams have had particularly memorable runs. But then again the entire brand of March Madness is the fact that the sport stacks an enormous number of advantages for larger programs that should make it functionally impossible for any smaller programs to beat them and then allow a crew of misshapen, headbanded, mustachioed March Madness Oafs the opportunity to try.
This season was bound to be a hangover after the glory of Boo Buie's two senior years, years in which Northwestern made the NCAA tournament easily, repeatedly vanquished Illinois and Indiana, and upset the number one team at home twice in the same calendar year against the best player in college basketball who was a literal giant. Buie gave Northwestern a player they've never had before, a bona fide star who other teams feared and a throwback player who needed four years to turn into a supernova.
But even without Buie, the Wildcats returned a seasoned, veteran team that had battled through the Big Ten twice. They played tough defense. They limited their own turnovers. And they are largely a team of older players who could play a physical shove-based basketball, willing to take advantage of the Big Ten's blood combat referees if that meant they could beat up on teams stocked with younger, more promising players. This was a team with Matt Nicholson who appears to have just gotten finished putting a bear in a full nelson and is wearing its fur on his face and Brooks Barnhizer, who routinely finished games without all of the teeth and blood he started with. In their first conference game, the 'Cats took a well-regarded but young and transfer-heavy Illinois team to overtime hell at Welsh-Ryan (this Northwestern team loves overtime) and won.
The plan was for Barnhizer to take over the team this season. Barnhizer emerged last year as Buie's do-it-all sidekick who could play defense, grab rebounds, hit his signature mid-range fadeaway, handle the ball, and never leave the court. Barnhizer already hit a legacy shot, the running layup to send last year's first-round tournament game to overtime, overcoming the adversity of having the CBS television commentators repeatedly make fun of his burgeoning mustache.
The surprise of the season, though, has been the emergence of Nick Martinelli who came out of nowhere to lead the Big Ten in scoring and minutes and who has become one of the most delightful pain-in-the ass players this team has ever produced. Martinelli is big and strong but also has a surprisingly deft touch around the basket and is left-handed; the result is that he scores with an array of clumsy-looking jump hooks, scoop shots, Rube Goldberg-style bank shots, and the occasional three to keep them honest that seems to me like the most annoying arsenal of shots that can be mustered by an opposing player. As Martinelli gained more and more playing time last season after a plague of injuries left large chunks of the Wildcats' starting rotation forced to watch games in casts and wheely scooters, commentators just kept pointing out that he was just going to go to his left-handed hook and everyone knew it, but modern players do not train against elderly men at the Y and were powerless to stop his musty, wood-paneled 1970s rec room game.
This year, Martinelli turned into an unstoppable scoring machine, becoming a devastating clean-up man around the rim, playing physical defense, and becoming a deadly clutch scorer. He finished off USC and a very good Maryland team with last-second game winners at Welsh-Ryan.
Martinelli embodies the fun of college basketball. A lot of NBA purists hate the college game because the difference in skill, athleticism, and tactics make it practically another sport. On the other hand, college basketball is delightfully more weird. There is no one in the optimized, pace-and-space NBA who plays like Nick Martinelli. College basketball is still the place where jump hook specialists and prematurely balding goggle guys and centers whose skill is just being absolutely enormous can thrive. There are simply not enough athletic freaks walking the Earth to remake college basketball in the NBA's image. This is not a value judgement or saying that the college game is more "pure" or whatever-- if a state-of-the art one-and-done NBA draft pick guy decided for some reason to come to Northwestern I would be thrilled-- it is just a fact that whenever Northwestern has a good player, his game is probably going to be a little weird because otherwise he probably wouldn't be here.
Even at full strength, Northwestern's hopes of returning to the tournament this season had dwindled as the 'Cats sank into the meat of the Big Ten schedule. They lost some heartbreaking games, most notably a on an absolute prayer launched with .8 seconds left in Iowa City, and also some stinkers to teams they probably should have beaten. Then, another plague of injuries. Barnhizer eventually could not longer try to play high-level basketball on a broken foot, as Chris Collins announced through tears. Jalen Leach, a grad-transfer scoring guard, tore his ACL soon after. The 'Cats lost two of their top three scorers, neither of whom will ever suite up in purple again. A gutted and discombobulated team then faltered on a depressing West coast road trip.
Despite the heartbreak, Nicky Jump Hooks has managed to lead the Wildcats into the first conference tournament where the Big Ten could have legally prevented more Northwestern basketball. They do not want to make it that easy to watch. The first-round games are banished to the Peacock streaming service as part of the Big Ten's wretched new media deal. The Big Ten's media empire draws its power from the simple promise that by getting your TV provider to carry its service you can watch all of your team's games, even the shitty ones that would never be on TV before. Instead, the games have now been farmed out to a patchwork of networks and streaming services-- one thing that I fully believe is that if a person is willing to spend their time watching a Northwestern-Penn State basketball game, that person should be allowed to do so even if they must also be put on a list. The teams playing in the first round of the tournament are playing for the chance for fans to actually see them on television in the next round. On the other hand, listening to a Northwestern Big Ten Tournament game on the radio during working hours is an important ritual in its own right.
There's no tanking in college basketball. If a team's top players get injured and the season falls apart, that's that. There's no draft picks or incentive for being bad. Players out of eligibility are done, either facing a fraught and uncertain world professional basketball in remote corners of the world or getting a job outside the game. The program moves on without them. This happens in the NBA too but no one really gives a shit about the fungible, fringe players on tanking rosters who are then recycled throughout the league as contract values or G-League bodies. Each season is a college basketball team's last. Every game in the conference tournament or maybe in the NIT or one of those fly-by-nite fake tournaments-- for example, there's the one Fox is pushing called "The Crown" where they keep putting graphics on teams in "The Crown" like it is something that already exists and people know about and does not exist in the fevered imagination of some Fox executive who assumes there are people in a sports bar saying hey who do you think is ending up in "The Crown" this season-- represents a chance to keep playing one last game.
It's been a rough season for Northwestern basketball. And yet here I am eyeing their side of the bracket thinking they might be able to beat Minnesota again and then who knows maybe steal another one. The Big Ten tournament regularly crushes any hope of the bottom teams advancing like a fleet of monster trucks rolling through a pile of old sedans. But it's March basketball and I'm going to embrace the power of hope, embrace the power of bullshit third-tier postseason tournament berths, and, most importantly, embrace the power of the left-handed jump hook.
