Men’s basketball post-mortem; In a season that rarely went right, Northwestern found something worth holding onto

While the rest of the team had already found themselves back in the locker room, Nick Martinelli stayed behind just a moment longer.

The senior from Glenview, Illinois, who had spent all four years with Northwestern, had just played his final game for the Wildcats. He was caught up with emotion as he stood in the tunnel of United Center on Thursday night. Northwestern head coach Chris Collins was emotional himself in the loss, comforting Martinelli as he rested his head on Collins’ shoulder with tears streaming down his face.

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After four months of highs and a lot of lows, Northwestern men’s basketball’s season has come to a close as the exhausted Wildcats — playing their third game in as many days — fell to Purdue, 81-68 in the Big Ten Tournament quarterfinals. Northwestern finished its year better than how it started with a final record of 15-19 overall, 5-15 in Big Ten play.

On paper, it looked like a step backwards for the program after missing the NCAA tournament for the second consecutive year after making it in 2023 and 2024. And in many ways it was. The Wildcats started off conference play with seven straight losses, started 13 different lineups and excruciating loss after excruciating loss, including a 40-point loss to Illinois in January.

But numbers alone don’t tell the entire story for what this team showed us.

Coming off those back-to-back NCAA Tournament appearances, Northwestern entered 2025-26 with an almost completely new roster with only 32.7% of the Wildcats’ minutes returning from the year prior, a product of the transfer portal era. With three-point shooting and rebounding hard to come by, Collins was forced to try to rebuild the program mid-flight, with younger, less proven pieces being given crucial minutes in a conference that is often unforgiving to young prospects.

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But through all the change and noise, Martinelli showed up every night.

The forward had 26 games with at least 20+ points, averaging 23.0 points on the…

Source link : https://sports.yahoo.com/articles/men-basketball-post-mortem-season-134727252.html

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Publish date : 2026-03-14 13:47:00

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