Reality slapped Northwestern in its season opener. That afternoon, facing Evansville in St. Louis, the young Wildcats scored only 26 points. Then reality whacked them again in the midst of the holiday season when against Southern Cal and Oakland they managed only 18 and 13 first-half points while stumbling to ugly consecutive losses.
But Wednesday, when they open their Big Ten season at Iowa, they truly will learn how rugged reality can be. In conference, every outing is like a neighborhood feud and each is played with an intensity far higher than any they have confronted.
“We have to get ourselves together as a group and play with some sort of intensity level that befits the level we’re playing at now,” coach Kevin O’Neill says. “If we don’t do that now, it’s going to be a long road.”
Rookie Hawkeyes coach Steve Alford knows all about these feuds from his days starring at Indiana in the ’80s.
“I think the hardest thing to do in this league is play freshmen and sophomores because they’re inexperienced,” he says.
Of course, O’Neill starts four sophomores and a freshmen, and plays four more freshmen off the bench. This is why so many of this team’s games have resembled the worst kinds of nightmares, and why, for the Wildcats, this season promises to be filled with the toughest kinds of growing experiences.
Take, for one example, the defining characteristic of the best teams turned out by O’Neill in his previous stops at Marquette and Tennessee. Each of them featured a defense that was tougher to crack than the tax code. These Wildcats have not mastered the techniques needed for that type of defense or performed with the unyielding effort needed to make it so smothering.
Take, for another example, the fragility of a team so young. This was first manifested when freshman center Brody Deren went down with a broken left elbow on Dec. 11, which forced O’Neill to switch 6-foot-8-inch Tavaras Hardy from power forward to center and 6-5 Steve Lepore from small forward to power forward.
“T. can’t play the center spot. It’s unfair to him to be playing center. It’s unfair to Steve to be playing the four,” O’Neill says of that switch.”
He hinted earlier this week that he might give 6-11 Aaron Jennings more time at center andreturn Hardy and Lepore to their more natural positions. But Jennings, at barely 200 pounds, is both raw and too much a rail for the rugged Big Ten.His insertion into the lineup does nothing to strengthen the other part of these Wildcats that is so fragile.
That would be their psyche, which was battered by Southern Cal and then battered again by Oakland. That first bit of bloodletting was not entirely unexpected, but quite revealing was the Wildcats’ reaction when they returned home and started slowly against a team that is a newcomer to Division I play.
Lepore, the Wildcats’ leading scorer, couldn’t buy a basket this day and his teammates emulated him.
“What happens with Steve,” explains O’Neill, “affects our team. If Steve doesn’t make a few shots, it puts a lot of down on our team. They look up to Steve as the leader.”
