Wildcats Pound Demons 63-36

Yesterday Northwestern moved to 6-1 with the Wildcats most dominating win over a BCS conference foe in several years. Kevin Colbe was great scoring 25 points and grabbing six rebounds. The only negative of the day from Coble was one missed free throw. I do have to say that NU's poor free throw shooting as a team does remain a concern.

Craig Moore also finished with double digit points for NU by scoring 14. He made 4-of-7 threes. NU did take advantage of the fact DePaul center Mac Koshwal was out with a foot injury by scoring a bunch of points in the lane on backdoor layups. Some DePaul fans will say not having Koshwal is what made the game so easy for NU, but I find it hard to believe one guy could have made a 27 point difference.

I also want to give a special thumbs to a few players who played well without scoring a bunch of points.

Michael "Juice" Thompson who scored only 7 points, but who had 8 assists and only 1 turnover in 34 minutes.

Jeff Ryan also played a really nice game despite not scoring. He played a good game on defense helping guard DePaul's Dar Tucker and he got four rebounds. One criticism is the fact that Ryan, and others, missed way too many layups. After one miss by Ivan Peljusic, Bill Carmody started storming towards the end of the bench. I thought for a moment he was going to leave the building. Funny as that moment was, I understood his frustration. In close games missing those short layups could be deadly.

Ivan Peljusic despite missing layups did play fairly well in grabbing six rebounds (tied with Coble for team high) in only 13 minutes.

Sterling Williams made a key basketball as time expired in the first half which I think was key to keeping NU’s momentum in half number two.

Luka Mirkovic played 12 minutes and grabbed two rebounds. They were his most productive minutes since the Brown game and I hope a signal he’s getting more into the flow of things.

Overall this was a great win and I look forward to what the rest of the season will hold. NU now takes eight days off for exams and returns to action December 15 against UMKC.