Nebraska men’s basketball heads back on the road Saturday for a 3 p.m. tip at Northwestern.
On Monday, the Huskers moved up two spots in the AP Top 25 to number eight, and they followed that up with a 90-55 win over Oregon in Lincoln. The No. 8 ranking is tied for the highest mark in program history, reached previously on Feb. 21, 1966.
Northwestern’s Welsh-Ryan Arena has been a manor of malevolence for Nebraska. Including last season’s 20-point comeback, a 68-64 win and the Huskers’ first victory at Welsh-Ryan Arena since February of 2014, Nebraska is just 2-9 in its last 11 games at Northwestern.
Big Ten Network will televise the game with Chris Vosters and Brian Butch on the call.
The Wildcats are 0-6 in Big Ten play this season, but they still have the Huskers’ full attention.
“You look at this Northwestern team and we showed this to our guys in film this morning,” Husker coach Fred Hoiberg said Thursday. “They’ve had leads in every game. (Wednesday) was a two-possession game late against Illinois, and they’ve had leads on the road at Michigan State, which we all know is extremely hard to do.
“This is a team that has a lot of heart. We know that we have to be on point or the same thing that happened a year ago is going to happen again when we got down 20 points and we had to scramble and fight and claw and found a way to steal one.”
Scouting Northwestern
Nick Martinelli isn’t just a star for Northwestern; he’s one of the least talked-about stars nationally in college basketball.
Martinelli, a 6-foot-7 senior, is the leading scorer in not just the Big Ten but in Division-I basketball. He is averaging 23.8 points while shooting 57.3% from the field and 52.4% from 3-point range this season.
“He’s the leading scorer in the country right now and just what he’s done over the course of this career, you’ve got to give him a lot of credit and their staff a lot of credit for developing him into the type of player that he is,” Hoiberg said. “He is truly special.”
In Big Ten play, through Thursday, Martinelli is second in the league in scoring (six games) at 25.7 points per game.
“Martinelli is the most unique player in our league with a variety of ways that he can score the ball and he’s shooting a really high percentage from 3 right now and his ISOs, they just give you anxiety with all the different things he can do,” Hoiberg said. “You can’t ever go down with your hands down. If he makes contested shots, you can’t get deflated.”
Point guard Jayden Reid has come on as of late for the Wildcats. In league play, the 5-foot-10 junior is averaging 5.7 assists per game, good for sixth in the Big Ten. In Wednesday’s loss to Illinois, Reid had a career-high 29 points and is third on the team in scoring, 12.5 per game, in those six games.
“He’s a jet. He can get down the floor quickly,” Hoiberg said of Reid. “He’s really good in the pick-and-roll, shot the ball with a lot of confidence. He’s playing with a lot of swagger right now. You’ve just got to try to slow him down and not give him any easy baskets.”
Arrinten Page (6-foot-11) can be a force defensively in both blocked shots and on the glass. The junior forward has the fourth-highest blocked shot percentage in league play (6.9%) and the 17th-best offensive rebounding percentage (9.5%).
The Wildcats’ scoring offense to date isn’t necessarily potent. The 73.7 scoring average in conference play ranks ninth.
Where they do excel on the offensive end is taking care of the basketball and making the right play. Their adjusted offensive efficiency is 119.54, good for 54th in the country. When the Wildcats run half-court offense, it is generally for longer possessions. Their tempo is 66.6, good for 250th of 365 Division I teams.
“They run great stuff. They’ve got the best scorer in the country,” Hoiberg said of Northwestern. “They do a great job in that program, top to bottom.”
Keys To the Game
The first key for Nebraska is to push the pace or play with their smart pace. A fast start offensively would certainly force the Wildcats to play faster than they normally do.
A 1.20 or higher point-per-possession mark for the Huskers would be ideal. In the Nebraska win over Oregon, their PPP was 1.355.
The second key is to have a disciplined approach defensively.
“I think they’ve been really disciplined in their approach with game plans, scout discipline, and they haven’t jumped off the map,” Hoiberg said of his team. “It’s a credit to Nate (Loenser) in the game plan that he’s putting together on the defensive end and it’s a credit to our guys for going out there and following it, pretty much every possession.”
The Wildcats clearly take care of the ball. They rank in the top 10 nationally in four offensive categories. Their 12.3% turnover rate leads the nation and their non-steal turnover percentage of 5.3% is eighth-best in the country. Northwestern’s 5.9% block rate is No. 5 nationally and its 7.0% steal rate is seventh.
Nebraska has done a good job of forcing turnovers this season, creating a takeaway on 19.2% of their defensive possessions; the national average is 17.3. Against Northwestern, playing solid, focused defense for the full possession should be enough.
“You can’t jump off the map,” Hoiberg said. “That’s the biggest thing. You can’t go out and try to force it; now you are out of position. If we have one guy out of position, our defense is in a really bad spot. If we allow middle penetrations, which we allowed three of those in the first five minutes against Oregon, they scored on two of them, we got lucky on the other one. So we just have to have a very disciplined approach on the defensive end.”
In league play, Northwestern leads the league with just 8.2 turnovers per game. If the Cornhuskers can reach or be just shy of their Big Ten play average, seven steals per game, they should be in very good shape.
The third key is adjusting to the opponent. They need a balance of the physicality they played with against Michigan State and the pace offensively against Oregon.
Nebraska slowed the pace in the win over Michigan State due the speed at which the Spartans played; they focused on quicker possessions against Oregon’s size and athleticism in that win. Against this Northwestern team and their slow pace, they clearly can’t get down by 20 points like last season’s comeback.
Northwestern coach Chris Collins has found a small wrinkle in the game plan against Nebraska. Making the proper adjustment to whatever the abnormal change is will be key.
