Carter carries sluggish Minnesota past Indiana

On a night when an Indiana starter sat out, a Minnesota bench player stepped up. This made all the difference on a night when Tubby Smith's team continued to struggle, but ultimately snatched an absolutely essential victory.
 
The Golden Gophers defeated the Hoosiers by a 62-54 score on Tuesday night in Minneapolis. A Minnesota club enduring prolonged offensive difficulties was able to hold off Tom Crean's crew only because of two equally rare occurrences.
 
The first unusual event was the absence of Devan Dumes from the Indiana lineup. After Dumes threw a number of elbows at Michigan State players in Saturday's loss to the Spartans, Crean--a straight-shooter but also a close friend of MSU boss Tom Izzo--felt it appropriate (and rightly so) to indefinitely suspend his guard, beginning with this encounter in Williams Arena. Not blessed with quality depth in the first place, the Hoosiers lost--in Dumes--their most prolific scorer and the man who carried them to their first conference win a week ago against Iowa. This factor caught up with IU in the Barn.

Yet, as improbable as an Indiana upset appeared to be in the minutes before tip-off, it's hard to shake the sense that Crean's kids could have--and would have--completed their conquest if the Gophers hadn't received an amazing effort from reserve forward Paul Carter.
 
A high-energy defender and a solid role player on a roster that often goes eight- or nine-deep, Carter isn't known for stuffing the stat sheet. His season-high came on Jan. 11, when Carter scored 14 points against Penn State. The offensive explosion represented the only time in 2009 that the 6-8 sophomore had scored more than 10 points in a game. How providential for Team Tubby, then, that with the rest of Minnesota's backcourt immersed in a significant and extended slump, Carter was able to fill the void against the Hoosiers by ringing up 22 points on 7-of-13 field goal shooting, supplemented by a 7-of-8 performance from the free throw line. It's entirely reasonable to say that without the 22-point masterpiece produced by an unlikely hero, the Gophers--uncomfortably lodged in the middle of the Big Ten standings--could have lost to the league's cellar dweller and crippled their NCAA Tournament chances in the process.
 
Why did Minnesota need Paul Carter to bail out his teammates against lowly Indiana? Very simply, the starting backcourt of shooting guard Lawrence Westbrook and point guard Al Nolen is hitting a February wall, the late-season point of exhaustion for a team unused to the long March to Madness.

Westbrook, a bona fide meal-ticket scorer when on his game, has scored just 14 points in Minnesota's last three contests, while Nolen--a legitimately quick point guard entirely capable of getting to the rim--has tallied just 10 points in that same span of time. When one realizes that Minnesota's big men--Colton Iverson and Ralph Sampson III--are long-term projects, the Gophers need to have reliable backcourt scoring. The declining fortunes of Westbrook and Nolen have naturally accompanied a downward slide in the Big Ten standings. At home against a Hoosier club that brought a 6-16 mark into the Land of 10,000 Lakes, the Westbrook-Nolen combo produced just 8 points, a shockingly low number that required Carter to carry the load. It's a good thing that Carter came through, because the absence of an unexpected lift--not to mention the absence of Devan Dumes--the only thing preventing Minnesota from falling off a cliff.
 
The Gophers will be happy with a season-sustaining win, but the men of Minnesota have to be on alert after this unconvincing effort: If Lawrence Westbrook and Al Nolen don't find a second wind, the second half of the Big Ten season will take an NCAA team down to the NIT.

 

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