Men’s Hoops: NU defense does in DePaul
By Adam Fusfeld
For the second straight game, a major-conference opponent entered Welsh-Ryan Arena with high hopes, only to leave with their heads hanging in defeat.
Northwestern (6-1) started Saturday’s game with a 7-0 run, and did not look back on its way to a 63-36 victory over local rival DePaul. A Craig Moore 3-pointer sandwiched between two Kevin Coble jumpers ignited this early lead. On the other end, the Blue Demons (4-2) turned the ball over twice, and converted on only one of their first 12 attempts from the floor to facilitate the Wildcats’ early advantage.
“We came out really aggressively and we stopped what they wanted to do,” junior forward Kevin Coble said. “We stuck with our stuff, we ran through so much in such a short period of time that we made them play 25-30 seconds of defense. As the possession goes on, it’s hard to guard it for that long. Teams don’t usually like to play that much defense.”
The offense was not the only thing slowing DePaul’s usually frenetic pace to a crawl. Entering the game DePaul had been averaging 71.0 points per contest. But coming off a west coast trip, and missing the Big East’s leading rebounder Mac Koshwal hurt even more.
In the first half they were held to 15 points on 21 percent shooting.
“I didn’t think our problems were defensively,” DePaul coach Jerry Wainwright said. “I thought obviously our problems were offensively. You put such strain on your defense when you don’t score.”
Meanwhile the Cats didn’t face any problems offensively. The team shot 46.4 percent from the field including 40 percent from beyond the arc. Coble led NU with 25 points, and senior guard Craig Moore chipped in 14.
After the game, Coble won the Waldo Fisher-Frank McGrath Award as the game’s most valuable player. Coble, who also won it in 2006, became the first player from either team to win the award twice since the Cats’ Bill McKinney did it in 1975 and 1976.
“Him and Craig are our main scorers,” sophomore guard Michael Thompson said. “And Kevin was really hot today. So every time I came down the court he was my first option –- as he is in practice. Even on our out-of-bounds plays, sometimes the play is not for him, but I look for him because I know he’s going to make that basket.”
Lost among Coble and Moore’s scoring outputs, was Thompson’s good game. Though the point guard finished with just seven points, he finished with eight assists against only one turnover, and “orchestrated everything flawlessly” according to coach Bill Carmody.
Defensively, the Cats were able to stop the Blue Demons’ leading scorer, forward Dar Tucker. Though the sophomore finished with 17 points, he shot just 6-of-20 thanks in part to NU’s defensive gameplanning.
“He’s a very, very good player,” Carmody said. “They were trying to isolate him on the low post there, and I thought we defended him fairly well and doubled him when we could. You can see what he did starting the second half, it wasn’t like we were far away from the guy, but he pulled twice on the wing for threes. But when he got to the basket, I thought our defense was actually pretty good.”
The Cats can take the momentum from this game into the finals week break. The blowout win over DePaul was another sign that this year’s team is different from one’s years past.
“I think they (the Cats) are a little bit different this year, I think they are a little more aggressive,” Wainwright said. “My hat’s off to Bill (Carmody), I think that he has enough guys now where they’re subbing and they’re playing a little faster.”
adamfusfeld2007@u.northwestern.edu
