Northwestern vs Purdue Basketball Recap

Northwestern 72, Purdue 64

Surely, a Northwestern team without its star player had little chance on Saturday evening in Evanston, Ill. Surely, a Purdue team that surprisingly lost two straight Big Ten games was going to get healthy.

Surely, the conventional wisdom fell flat on its face inside a lively and giddy Welsh-Ryan Arena, where a remarkable result altered the college basketball landscape.

While it's entirely true that the Boilermakers - until recently, the No. 6 team in the United States - had been profoundly struggling entering this tilt in the Land of Lincoln, Coach Matt Painter's club wasn't sliding because of unusual youth, inexperience, or similarly disadvantages. The same roster (minus injured guard Lewis Jackson) that powered its way to the Sweet 16 roughly 10 months ago had visions of the Final Four. Veteran composure stood as a central reason for the optimism that pervaded the Purdue camp.

A Tuesday loss at home to Ohio State was unmistakably discouraging, but the Boilers' previous loss came on Jan. 9 at the Kohl Center, one of the toughest places to play in college basketball. Dropping a decision in Wisconsin's home building wasn't cause for concern, so after the brutal endgame collapse against Ohio State on Jan. 12, most hoops pundits expected this club to regain its winning edge and renew its march toward Indianapolis on the first weekend of April. Much as Michigan State gained strength from the knowledge that the 2009 Final Four was held in Detroit, the site of the 2010 Final Four - Lucas Oil Stadium, home of the Indianapolis Colts - figured to give Painter's pupils a kick in the pants at Northwestern.

A team this talented and battle-tested had to avoid a three-game schnide... right? A team that, just two weeks ago, was throttling West Virginia and feeling full of itself had to take advantage of a Wildcat crew without meal-ticket magic man Kevin Coble... right?

Wrong.

In a nip-and-tuck affair, it was Northwestern - for all its limitations - that found a furious finishing kick, while Purdue faded away into the night.

From the 13:26 mark of the second half until the 1:33 mark of regulation - that's just under 12 minutes of clock time if you're scoring at home - neither team led by more than four points. Boilers-Cats was nothing if not even, but Purdue's inability to take command spoke volumes about the visitors' struggles in Evanston.

Boilermaker center JaJuan Johnson - so dominant against West Virginia but now listless and brain-dead in Big Ten action - fouled out with 3:49 left in regulation after scoring just seven points against an undersized Wildcat front line. Guard Keaton Grant, who so noticeably wilted and shriveled in the final stages of the Ohio State debacle, couldn't bounce back against the Purple People, scoring only six points and giving Matt Painter reason to read the riot act to his group of underachievers.

No, instead of rising to the occasion and fending off a third straight conference setback, Purdue got outclassed in the latter stages of this contest, while Northwestern received two big plays from an unlikely source. NU's leading scorer John Shurna (averaging 17 points per game) tallied only eight points for coach Bill Carmody's roster, but that deficiency was minimized because a third wheel emerged for the home team on Saturday: Drew Crawford.

A green and very lean freshman from Naperville, Ill., Crawford took hold of this tilt with two-fisted totality. He made two straight 3-point plays, one of them an old-fashioned kind, to break the aforementioned four-point threshold and deliver a 64-57 lead to Northwestern with 1:33 left. Purdue never made another credible surge after that moment, and the double-upset was complete. One shocker was that the Wildcats could bounce back from a very discouraging loss to Wisconsin on Wednesday night; the even bigger surprise was that Purdue fell to 2-3 in the Big Ten, three games behind Michigan State.

Yes, the team that was a legitimate Final Four contender two weeks ago is now on the ropes in the chase for the regular season Big Ten title.

Conventional wisdom didn't have an enjoyable evening in Evanston, to be sure.

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