The Big Ten's Own Rules Could Not Prevent More Northwestern Basketball

 

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.

Boo Buie Makes It Happen

The last time Northwestern’s men’s basketball team tried to follow up its greatest season of all time, they were not able to get back into the tournament. They weren’t able to conjure up the small miracles they needed year before to get them to the school’s first NCAA Tournament and they were unable to call upon the crowd that had materialized out of nowhere to turn Welsh-Ryan into an actual home court for the first time in recent memory while trying to do so in a windswept 20,000 seat stadium they had to share with the monster truck Grave Digger. They also did not have Boo Buie.

Boo Buie will play the last college basketball games of his life in this tournament. Although the NCAA has relinquished virtually all of its ability to regulate anything in college sports, the one rule they seem to agree on is that Boo Buie cannot stay at Northwestern pursuing multiple PhD degrees and publishing several insightful monographs that are critiqued only by his academic rival, a fifteenth-year senior at Michigan State whom he both crossed up and also neglected to cite in a paper presented on a panel where the Spartan served as the chair. He’s out of senior years. 

In the last two years, Boo Buie has emerged as Northwestern's greatest player. He is not the first player to take the program to the tournament, but he has done something far more impressive at Northwestern which is to make playing in the tournament seem almost normal.

Northwestern has had some excellent players come through, but they always seemed like heroic Sisyphus disciples. During the Bill Carmody era, Northwestern appeared to be playing a different sport from the rest of the Big Ten as he shifted recruiting efforts to overseas and sent the Wildcats out there in novel offensive and defensive configurations as a concession that he would not beat conference teams playing normal basketball and instead had lured them into a diabolical house of mirrors where they would have to watch a bunch of goggle guys gradually back cut them after 33 seconds. Personally, I loved that.  Northwestern basketball was at its nadir and the only rational solution was to play some exotic, janky, rec-spec basketball. I was crushed that America never got an opportunity to fall in love with John Shurna's deadly but goofy-ass jumper for a few hours in March and disappointed that Northwestern's administration never took my advice to simply claim an NIT title like a False Dmitri because no one would ever both to check.

A portrait of the False Dmitri, a man who claimed to be the son of Ivan The Terrible in the early seventeenth century and succeeded in briefly becoming Tsar, which led to a succession of other people also claiming to be Dmitri with decreasingly successful results.  The fourth False Dmitri does not have a Wikipedia page; "some argue that False Dmitry IV is just False Dmitry III due to bad record keeping," Wikipedia says.

It probably would be surprising even two years ago for a Northwestern fan to predict the growing Cult of Boo Buie. Buie arrived as a fascinating but flawed player, one capable of scoring outbursts used mainly to turn Tom Izzo the color of a chuck roast once or twice a year, but also by throwing ill-considered passes or dribbling into situations where he would find himself hopelessly in over his head like the basketball equivalent of a Coen Brothers guy. He was the type of basketball player that probably would be infuriating except in the zero-stakes world of Northwestern basketball it was endearing just because he was willing to just go out there and try shit.  I have absolutely no idea what happened last season, but all of a sudden he kept doing spectacular things. stopped making mistakes, and became one of college basketball’s most reliable floor generals.

Buie has done things I’ve never seen a Northwestern player do before. For the first time I can remember, Northwestern has a player that scares opposing fanbases. It is very rare that other teams’ fans can even name a Northwestern player, but anyone who shares my twisted curiosity for reading the most bottom of the barrel drivel a person can find from opponents’ most deranged and borderline dark web message boards knows that they know who Buie is, they do not like him, and they are wondering why he has been in college for what they estimate as 17 consecutive years. 

Buie has been a key part of making basketball games an event. Welsh-Ryan has become a home court.  Anyone who has ever attended or even watched a game on TV knows that since time immemorial, opposing fans would swarm the arena and make a big ruckus and the only consolation was that the old Welsh-Ryan was such a dilapidated barn that they would have to go home aching with bleacher back and scoreboard dot eyes. The arena largely existed as a place for Indiana fans living in the Chicago area to leave angry Yelp reviews.  

While it has always been a tall task to find more than 30,000 people willing to cheer for Northwestern's football team in its home stadium regardless of its success, it is considerably easier to find 5,000 people who have emerged like 75-year cicadas to root for a team that is actually winning games. Northwestern only lost one Big Ten game at Welsh-Ryan all season. They beat a top-ten rated Illinois team at home, and no one even rushed the court.  Pat Ryan may have paid for the lavishly renovated new arena but Boo Buie owns it.

It might not be fair to his teammates to ascribe Northwestern’s success to Buie alone, but it’s impossible to ignore his presence. He almost never leaves the court. He orchestrates nearly every possession. Every Northwestern set starts with Buie at the top of the key scanning the defense as the rest of the team offers him a menu of picks that he can use to find an open teammate or get a weaker defender switched on him so he can barbecue him with a crossover and his signature floater or casually launch a 27 foot jumper. He is constantly directing other players on offense and defense; in situations when an opposing player has a trademark shot celebration where he acts like he is a delighted Price is Right audience member whose name has been called by Rod Roddy, he is apparently in charge of leading his teammates to make fun of that. When the game is on the line, everyone watching the game knows the ball is going to Buie, and he’s made a shocking number of do-or-die shots against top teams in the biggest games. 

It's almost March! Boo Buie’s game winner lifted Northwestern over No. 14 Indiana 64-62. “More people need to wake up. This isn’t luck. It can’t be luck at this point,” said Buie after the win. Wildcats have sole posession of second place in the Big Ten standings behind Purdue pic.twitter.com/jna9qSc2NO

— Ballislife.com (@Ballislife) February 16, 2023

Indiana fans were apparently whining that this move was a push-off to which I tell them to call Bryon Russell about it. Crying about uncalled fouls is ridiculous unless of course the referees ignore an egregious goaltending situation in which case you are not complaining about basketball on the internet but rectifying a Grave Injustice

Buie and the Wildcats have a difficult task ahead of them. They are matched up against Florida Atlantic, which is also a tough, veteran team that returns largely intact from a miracle run to last year’s final four. At the same time, the FAU team seems to be a little bit more inconsistent this season, and I have heard grumblings about their seeding, which is still a very funny bit to a person who has almost no experience rooting for a team in the tournament-- it is impossible for me to see someone complaining about seeding and not hear them yelling "my seeds!" in the same voice Tom Hardy uses The Revenant to talk about his pelts. The Wildcats have been playing some strong defense and if the officials let them do a little bit of shoving and if Brooks Barnhizer and Ryan Langborg get hot from three, they can give anyone an unpleasant afternoon.

Unfortunately, Northwestern is not sending the best version of its team against FAU. The Wildcats literally limped to the end of the season. Two senior starters went down with injuries on a squad that already leaned heavily on its upperclassman-heavy starting lineup. With a fully healthy team, Northwestern looked dangerous enough to me that I could envision a Sweet 16 run. Instead, players in various configurations of casts and scooters were forced to spend the last few weeks of the season watching the Wildcats drop a Big Ten home game, lose on the road to a Michigan State team that they had beaten so badly at Welsh-Ryan that it caused Tom Izzo to uncork an embarrassing podium-thumping jeremiad against whatever he thinks analytics is, and make a quick exit from the Big Ten Tournament.

Izzo, posed like an elderly relative forced into having a pandemic-era zoom birthday party, unleashes his screed about analytics.  One example of an analytic is that at that point, Izzo had lost four out of five of his last games against Northwestern

If the Wildcats manage to beat FAU, they will have their work cut out for them. For some reason, Northwestern was drawn into what I’ve seen described as a very difficult bracket quadrant; if it’s not a Region of Death, it’s at the very least a Region of Gastric Distress. The defending-champion UConn Huskies are lurking for whoever manages to win on Friday; last year’s runner-up San Diego State is also in the bracket and so is an Illinois team desperate to avoid another early tournament exit which always feature slow motion shots of a spittle-flecked Brad Underwood damply screaming like he is engaged in some sort of molting phase and will emerge in the second half with wings, extra legs, and an even stupider haircut.

The expectations for Northwestern in this tournament remain low. No one expects them to win more than one game. But the Wildcats have a purpose beyond basketball: for Boo Buie to keep playing one more game in a Northwestern uniform.