The First Disappointing Northwestern Basketball Season

Northwestern has had basketball disappointments-- heartbreakingly close losses to miss the NCAA tournament, falling victim to NIT bracketology, having Big Ten championship celebrations derailed by grim tidings from the League of Nations-- but the Wildcats have never had a disappointing season because most Northwestern seasons were considered successful if they played a regulation game without the opposing team bulldozing the arena into a pile of rubble.

The Wildcats entered the season with all the swagger and confidence of a Defending NCAA Tournament Participant.  The Associated Press, which was so bamboozled by Northwestern's improvement last year that they could not find a Northwestern logo for their website, ranked Northwestern to start the season.  With all but one returning starter, the Wildcats seemed like a decent bet to make the Tournament again, to rack up RPIs and Ken Poms, to continue collecting the ire of college basketball fans who were sick of Michael Wilbon's face.  This marked the first season where the NCAA Tournament did not seem like a distant hope or a ludicrous dream, but something to prepare for, that fans could get one of those giant maps and tiny tanks and the tank-pushing sticks and use it to figure out which games they could win and lose before triumphantly arriving in some regional.

Instead, Northwestern struggled all season and floundered their way out of the NCAA tournament, the NIT, and possibly even one of those disreputable fly-by-nite tournaments that are constantly derailed by disputes about whether there're any rules what say a dog can't play basketball.  The purple 'Cats were stomped into wine by Texas Tech, buzzer-beaten by Georgia Tech, and NBA Jammed by Trae Young.  They barely survived overtime against their two crappy in-state rivals DePaul and Illinois.  The Michigan State game involved them racing to a 27 point lead against the conference champions and then slowly sinking into quicksand for the entire second half, a loss so painful and needlessly cruel that Chris Collins turned into a cartoon character.

Collins gets so upset that he reverts to his original toon form

People following this team have spent all season trying to figure out how the Wildcats fell from an NCAA Tournament team to sweating out losses against the likes of Rutgers and Iowa.  They did lose two players, most notably Sanjay Lumpkin, the anchor of their defense, who allowed the team to ride his chest like a burly chariot through Big Ten frontcourts and into and endless conga line of charges.

The go-to explanation has involved the team's temporary relocation to the All State Arena located far from campus at the end of an O'Hare runway.  This is a satisfying reason because the All State Arena is the sports equivalent of a floating garbage island that should be torn down brick by brick during a brawl between fans of what I imagine as a version of Warrant formed by the drummer and the Warrant formed by the guitarist who in this scenario are suing each other and have formed armies of bellicose supporters that have been tearing up arenas and county fairs for the better part of a decade.  Certain uninformed cretins have maligned the pre-renovation Welsh-Ryan Arena as "an arena where you probably could bet on fighting lizards" or "the lunchroom" but those people are missing the charm of melding into the person next to you in tightly-packed bleachers while sitting close enough to spray pretzel crumbs onto Gene Keady's combover, and I will never like a sports venue more.

Every single time I lose my keys or leave the 
house without some vital item, it is because 
the space it should occupy has been taken over 
by the knowledge from this article that Gene 
Keady spent $600 a week to have Gary Oldman 
Fifth Element Future Hair, and I frankly I deserve it

Or maybe the most reasonable explanation is this:

It would be impossible for Northwestern to recapture the giddy ecstasy from last year's run as the tournament became a possibility and then clinched by an impossible sports movie play at the last possible second.  It is no easy task to continue to make the tournament in the Big Ten, and harder still without being able to ambush opponents who instinctively view Northwestern jerseys as dunk runways.  If Northwestern has fallen from its zenith this season, this same group of players can be celebrated for creating a zenith to fall from.

AN AESTHETIC REVIEW OF THE MATCHUP ZONE DEFENSE

There is a notion that the zone defense is for cowards, a gimmick for overmatched teams that will be instantly vaporized on the dribble, posted up into the stanchion, and relentlessly bullied.  This is ridiculous; teams at every level run zone defenses..  But when a team switches, like Northwestern did, from a brutal man-to-man scheme that got them to the tournament to a match-up zone, the move reeks of desperation.  For Northwestern fans, though, the zone did not just represent a change in basketball strategy but the aesthetic embrace of Northwestern basketball.

Northwestern basketball under Bill Carmody did not involve strategy but an entire ethos.  Carmody's teams sought to bamboozle opponents with unorthodox basketball: a ponderous Princeton offense that involved doing backcuts at opponents until they just let them have a layup under then-glacial 35-second shot clock; a bizarre 1-3-1 zone defense that looked like a basketball jellyfish as players lunged and undulated in patterns that opponents had not seen before that forced them to pause before rising up and dunking through them.  Carmody basketball hoped to confuse opponents for long enough for Northwestern's less heralded players to get a lead.  "Vince played him as well as he could," Tim Doyle said about his center Vince Scott's matchup against Ohio State's Greg Oden in an article with the astonishing title "Cats can't climb Mount Oden." "But Greg is going to the NBA after this season and Vince is going to be an investment banker" is the unofficial motto of Northwestern basketball.

"Minnesotan Gets So Frustrated He Appears to Punt" (2013)
(original image from Insidenu)

The matchup zone used this season is not as aesthetically pleasing as the 1-3-1 zone, with a destroyer like the National Basketball Association's Reggie Hearn terrorizing unwitting guards at the top, and a masked Luka Mirkovic hovering around the free throw line like the Phantom of the Paint.  That particular combination represents the platonic ideal of Northwestern basketball, as long as it is run in front of an enormous number of screaming Indiana fans in Welsh-Ryan Arena, under a malfunctioning dot scoreboard.  But Collins's zone occasionally produces sublime moments: players dashing around the wing to deny entry passes and stay just in front of players rendered into jabronis foolish enough to drive, frustrated perimeter passing, and the most enjoyable sports sight of all, aggressive pointing.

NORTHWESTERN HEADING INTO THE BIG TEN TOURNAMENT

The Wildcats have limped into the Big Ten tournament without Vic Law or Jordan Ash and without a win since February 6.  They've already said goodbye to the All-State Arena, which is only weeks away from giving itself over to Grave Digger, SkullHammer, Car-Nivore, and the other monster trucks to jam it beyond recognition.

Although I post incessant references to Grave Digger constantly, I have no idea how the scoring system for monster jam actually works and I plan to never find out

The team faced an impossible task of topping one of the most joyful sports experiences I've ever witnessed.  Time did not stop when Pardon hit the layup, the Wildcats did not freeze forever in mid-air when CBS announced they were officially in the Tournament, and the world continued to spin even after Pat Fitzgerald burst into the locker room and baptized the basketball team into his cult of the vigorous first pump. 

It is strange and almost surreal for a Northwestern basketball season to be disappointing because they did not live up to their preseason top-25 ranking.  The Carmody teams that came close enough to knock on the Tournament door or at least make enough noises for the Committee to check and see if it was the wind provided disappointment and heartbreak, but the expectations were never this high.  Most of the time, it was impossible to be disappointed by a Northwestern basketball team, provided that they did not break any federal laws. 

Sure, Northwestern did not storm back through the Big Ten and shatter records on the way to the NCAA Tournament.  But this team, with Bryant McIntosh, Scottie Lindsey, and Gavin Skelly who may be playing their final game tonight in the Big Ten Tournament, has already done something I didn't think I'd ever see and changed the entire notion of what is possible for the men's basketball team. 

NORTHWESTERN BOOKS A TRIP TO THE NCAA TOURNAMENT!!! DERERK PARDON'S GW LAYUP EVEN BETTER W/TITANIC MUSIC!!! 🏀🚢🎼 (@Espngreeny @darrenrovell) pic.twitter.com/yn4HL9uqaR

— 🏀🚢🎶TITANIC HOOPS🏀🚢🎶 (@TitanicHoops) March 2, 2017

Until of course, they run the table in the Big Ten Tournament and find their way back to the Dance.  As last year's team proved, anything is possible.

NCAA TOURNAMENT PARTICIPANTS

Just a day before the Gumbel Brother put Northwestern on the bracket, Welsh-Ryan exploded in a paroxysm of basketball-related screaming, and the Sports Media Personalities unleashed their unholy torrent of purple-clad selfies, the Wildcats paid tribute to their basketball heritage by getting absolutely waxed by Wisconsin in the semi-finals of the Big Ten Tournament.  Most years, that kind of game capped off a losing season in the Big Ten, snuffing the tiniest ember of hope for a miracle Big Ten Tournament run to the dance.  This time, it didn't really matter.  Northwestern had already beaten Wisconsin in Madison without Scottie Lindsey.  They had made it further than any other Wildcat team had ever gone in the Big Ten Tournament by shithousing Rutgers with a record 31-0 first-half run and then silencing a rowdy, mother-booing, pro-Maryland D.C. crowd, and they had, by all accounts from even the most eccentric, apostate Bracketologists, qualified for the NCAA Tournament.

They can't stop it now; it was on television

There is no doubt about it now.  Wildcat fans can finally slam that Northwestern button on their internet NCAA brackets.  They can send off a glorious, stone-bleachered Welsh-Ryan Arena into Stadium Valhalla after it finally transformed from an empty house of basketball horrors into a venue capable of drowning out Jim Nantz.  They can surreptitiously watch the Wildcats at work on a Tournament Thursday while nervously toggling the "boss button" link that activates spreadsheets so profoundly fraudulent that they could only work on Kruger Industrial Smoothing-caliber management.

The "boss button" spreadsheets are a perfectly grotesque satire of 
whatever it is people do in offices

Chris Collins referred to the tournament berth as "the beginning of Northwestern basketball." It is not.  There has been more than a century of Northwestern basketball, most of which involved losing. More often than not, Northwestern basketball games meant trekking in subzero temperatures to a home arena full of opposing fans cocksure in their teams' victory and, more often than not, a loss. WGN had a great interview with Vic Law (Law comes on around the 1:45 mark) where he talks about wanting to change the atmosphere at Welsh-Ryan. "When we get good," Law remembers telling a reporter when he first committed, "we're going to blow the roof off the place."  This was a bold prediction about an arena where the Wildcats traditionally played home games only in scare quotes as rival chants echoed through the rafters.  Purdue-Northwestern games traditionally involved Wildcat fans surrounded by train costumes and Gene Keady combovers; whatever Purdue fans came gallivanting into the arena this year got completely drowned out on the television broadcast.

The consignment of Northwestern basketball to a pre-tournament dark age, though, obscures some really good players and teams, some of which could have even gotten to the Tournament if not for a truly beguiling series of separate misfortunes.  Northwestern may have lost games, but fans got to see Davor Duvancic take down Illinois, Michael Jenkins sink Iowa, Tre Demps buzzerbeat upon Michigan, and John Shurna break the scoring record with a jumpshot that could only exist at Northwestern.

Someone hoisted a Shurnahead at the Selection Sunday celebration 
because Shurnaheads should remain a Northwestern tradition even 
far into the future, when Welsh-Ryan is renovated again to have 
automated grape dispensers for high-dollar donors and basketball 
devolves into Bill Laimbeer's prophesied "combat" phase, a yellowed 
Shunahead stands watch over the severed heads of the Big Ten's weakest 
basketball robots

Northwestern could compete with and beat other Big Ten schools in basketball, but it had always felt outside the rest of the college basketball world.  The Carmody era partly fueled this-- almost no other team in the country played like Northwestern with its intricate offense and zone defenses, Carmody sought out international players that arrived with intriguing nicknames like "The Moroccan Michael Jordan," and he unleashed a masked Luka Mirkovic upon the Big Ten.  More than that, though, Northwestern usually hovered nowhere near the NCAA Tournament bubble with its attendant bracketologies and complaints about seeds and everything else.  The NCAA Tournament sucks up 99% of discussion about college basketball and Northwestern existed in a strange basketball Siberia, only affecting the tournament by occasionally ruining someone's RPI.

There is something that is ludicrous about Northwestern's Selection Sunday gathering. More than a thousand people gathered to celebrate a committee's decision that they were one of the 68 best teams in the country, promised nothing but an extra game-- should Vanderbilt clobber them in the first round, the hullabaloo over their bid would be as ridiculous as a silent film about a dandy dressing up in his finest tails and spats only to walk out his door and get sprayed by carriage puddles.  But more than 1,000 people in Welsh-Ryan didn't care about the sanity of sitting for hours for the chance to scream at a jumbotron showing promos for Kevin Can Wait.  Northwestern came in from the cold.

A HIGHLY TECHNICAL ANALYSIS OF VANDERBILT

The tournament has spoken and, after sending a bunch of Big Ten teams to some extremely Big Ten cities, the Wildcats will meet Vanderbilt in Salt Lake City.  The location is disappointing to Chicago-area fans, but on the other hand, I am pretty sure they could put Northwestern in a regional so remote that it involves a rickety, slat-dropping rope bridge and we'd still be thrilled.

Northwestern will play Vanderbilt, a team that spent much of the season on the bubble because of its fifteen losses.  Their inclusion as a nine seed has stirred some controversy over on the Bracket Justice Internet where fans for whom inclusion in a 68-team tournament is not a once-a-century occurrence squabble about regions and paths and sound exactly like the Tom Hardy character from The Revenant replacing his endless pelt monologues.

MY SEEDS

The two schools have little basketball history-- they've played just five times, last in 1992, and have essentially no basketball animus.  But anyone who can't dredge up some dumb, sports grievance has no place writing a lightly-trafficked blogspot blog, so let's remember that the schools had a nascent football rivalry before Vanderbilt abruptly canceled a home-and-home series in 2013-2014 without warning.  The Chicago Tribune described the cancellation as done in "the coldest possible way--with a letter sent via U.S. mail," a schedule adjustment so callous that it inspired a major metropolitan newspaper to traffic in Dan LaFontaine sentences.  You might not think that this passes muster by even the flimsiest of margins, but as we speak BYCTOM rivalry-mongering intern Tim Beckman is hard at work drafting CANCEL THIS, VANDERBILT! (IN REFERENCE TO YOUR 2013-14 FOOTBALL SCHEDULING) signs to distribute in Salt Lake City but he keeps running out of room.

Vanderbilt's coach Bryce Drew made a name for himself in March Madness by leading Valparaiso on a magical run in 1998 most known for hitting a shot from a full-court pass eerily similar to Northwestern's own play against Michigan.  As his Wikipedia entry says: "Drew secured his place as a Valparaiso, Indiana, celebrity along with popcorn guru Orville Redenbacher."  Like Collins, Drew is the son of a coach, Valparaiso's Homer Drew. Chicagoans, however, may be more familiar with him as a brief member of the post-Jordan Shitty Bulls, where he teamed with Fred Hoiberg in an inadvertent Cradle of College Basketball Coaches.

Drew on the Bulls in the Dragan Tarlac Era

Both teams face a tough path out of the region.  The winner of Thursday's game will like face Gonzaga, lurking in the bracket like a Morrison-haired monster.  Almost no brackets have Northwestern getting past them to the Sweet 16, except for mine, where I will just keep writing down Northwestern's name because they're finally in the dang bracket and absolutely no one can stop me.

NCAA Recruiting

Northwestern delivered a less than convincing win over cellar-dwelling Indiana in Evanston last night. It truly is a remarkable reversal that any Northwestern victory over the storied Indiana program could be seen as unsatisfying. It seems like it was only yesterday that Bobby Knight was prowling about the Indiana sidelines in his red sweater freshly stained with the blood of impertinent freshmen, hurling candy at Northwestern students in a bizarre show of rapprochement after blowing up at Northwestern hecklers. Not that he is the only Big Ten coach to have a problem with the Wildcat faithful. I remember, although cannot find, an article where Gene Keady specifically lamented Northwestern's sharp heckling that raised the hackles of his comb-over. Paleontologists currently speculate that Keady's comb-over is used for internal temperature control, much like the non-dinosaur Dimetrodon's fin.


I talked briefly with Keady once. And,
you know, the thing about a Gene Keady,
he's got lifeless eyes. Black eyes. Like a
doll's eyes. When he comes at you, doesn't
seem to be living until he bites you, and
those black eyes roll over white and
then you hear that terrible high-pitched
screaming

As much as I enjoy watching a former Big Ten power get its teeth kicked in, it's hard to gloat over Tom Crean's lot after reading this SI piece about the fall of the program in the wake of the Kelvin Sampson dismissal. After Sampson left, IU lost six scholarhip players on top of Eric Gordon, who has been punished by joining the L.A. Clippers. Sampson certainly existed in the thick of college athletics' seedy underbelly with his numerous NCAA violations and his recruitment of players with weak academics and problems with pots. As the article describes:

"A Sampson recruit, Holman had been suspended for a season in high school for shoving a ref; his short temper surfaced in Crean's office. At one point, according to Crean, Holman became so animated that he grabbed a potted plant and threw it against the wall, triggering a call to campus police."


Kelvin Sampson and his assistants hit the recruiting trail in Indiana

It's clear that Sampson violated several recruiting violations in the intricate code that governs interactions between players and recruits, but the current NCAA rules basically institutionalize bizarre and seemingly arbitrary boundaries.


The NCAA recruiting regulations are
somewhat reminiscent of the Lever
ceremonies at Versailles, where the rigid
social hierarchy was clearly delineated by
one's proximity to the Sun King's person.

NCAA RECRUITING VIOLATIONS AND PIRACY: A CLUNKY SEGUE

While Kelvin Sampson's gross recruiting violations have certainly upset basketball at Indiana, he could have been up to more nefarious crimes. In particular, Indiana fans can take comfort in the fact that Kelvin Sampson is most likely not a pirate.

Modern connotations of piracy involve doubloons, chin stubble, parrots, the word "arrr," and truly inept baseball organizations. These romanticized notions of piracy come from several sources. One of the most notable is Captain Charles Johnson who authored A General History of the Robberies and Murders of the most notorious Pyrates first published in 1724. The volume publicized the exploits of several pirates such as Blackbeard and Black Bart and contains the word "sloop" roughly 27,000 times. The most interesting part of Pyrates is the unknown author: no one has identified a Captain Johnson in 1724 that could have published this book; literary scholars, or in this case people who research people who write pseudonymous accounts of eighteenth century pirate books which is probably one particularly tweedy man from a a corner of Britain so remote that his house is still fueled by coal and orphans, believe that Daniel Defoe is a potential author.

The other major source of piratical tales is of course Robert Louis Stevenson, whose Treasure Island is the standard text of the flintlock and cutlass set.


Robert Louis Stevenson (far right) took to the seas himself on this
apparently mustache-themed yacht in 1888

WHAT YOU NEED TO KNOW ABOUT PIRATES RIGHT NOW

Piracy has been much in the news lately involving the seemingly out of control pirate attacks in the Gulf of Aden in Somalia. Piracy has experienced a boom since the collapse of the government in 1991, and the rise of the pirate society in Boosaaso is chronicled in this excellent New York Times article:

"The pirates use fast-moving skiffs to pull alongside their prey and scamper on board with ladders or sometimes even rusty grappling hooks. Once on deck, they hold the crew at gunpoint until a ransom is paid, usually $1 million to $2 million."


Do not bring your florins here

As the author Jeffrey Gettleman who is, I gather, the Times's number one man on the spot for all pirate related information notes, the pirates are not going anywhere:

"The pirates are sea savvy. They are fearless. They are rich and getting richer, with the latest high-tech gadgetry like handheld GPS units. And they are united."

Gettleman then, I presume, donned a colorful bandanna before throwing a smoke grenade and making off with a barrel full of spices from the Orient and the Spanish Crown Jewels.

The most brazen attack came in September, when pirates seized a Ukrainian freighter filled with military hardware including 33 T-72 Soviet-designed battle tanks, 150 grenade launchers, and 6 antiaircraft guns. The crew was unable to fight back due to the apparent difficulties in using tanks in naval battles, and the fact that grenade launchers lose their value when taken out of their collector packaging. In November, the Indian Navy declared that it had sunk a pirate mothership, which I found exciting because it marked the first time that the word "mothership" had been used in popular media since Jeff Goldblum was inexplicably a sci-fi action star in the mid-1990s. Unfortunately, it appears as though the pirate mothership was actually a Thai fishing boat.

For those who want even more information about piracy in the Gulf of Aden, UNOSAT has provided a series of informative hi-res maps charting the 2008: the year in piracy and density of pirate attacks. Do yourself a favor and use these wallpaper your house or van.

WHITE RAJAS: A SOLUTION TO PIRACY?

International cooperation has failed to crack down on pirates for a number of key reasons including the vast expanse of sea in which the tiny pirate vessels operate, the lack of a stable government in Mogadishu, and the continued operation of the mythical pirate mothership which presumably dictates all pirate movements under the control of a single pirate mastermind.

In the mid-nineteenth century, pirate raiders flourished in the river networks within Sarawak in the Borneo portion of what is now Malaysia.



British adventurer James Brooke brought his ship The Royalist, flying the menacing colors of the Royal Yacht Squadron, to the aid of the Sultan of Brunei. Brooke gained control of Sarawak as a gesture of gratitude from the Sultan and also because he trained his ship's guns on the royal palace and threatened to blow it asunder if his demands were not met. Once established as the White Raja of Sarawak, Brooke dedicated his rule to fighting piracy and taxing the hell out of the Chinese population.


Brooke was an early advocate of gunboat .
diplomacy. He reportedly developed an interest
for the strategy immediately after purchasing a
gunboat

Though Brooke acted in the interests of Britain and occasionally used British vessels on his ongoing attacks on Sarawak's pirate community, he never gained official recognition from Britain as the bona fide Raja of Sarawak. In fact, Parliament led by self-appointed Victorian conscience Richard Cobden staged an inquiry into his prize-taking in 1850, but he was exonerated of the charge of inhumanity, which apparently was on the books in Britain in Victorian times despite the metaphysical implications.

Of course, the British Empire is out of white rajas to high-handedly seize territory and menace pirates with top of the line cannon technology. Perhaps to atone for his recruiting sins, Kelvin Sampson can get himself a fighting yacht and use his mastery of cell phones to get in touch with the Sultan of Brunei.