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player ready...Sophomore guard/forward John Kiser was clearly frustrated Thursday night.
Valparaiso’s 84-50 loss to Northwestern at Allstate Arena was the Crusaders’ worst since a 79-44 defeat at No. 7 Kansas on Nov. 15, 2010.
After setbacks at Purdue and Ball State, Valparaiso (8-3) has dropped three straight regular-season games for the first time since November 2013 at Illinois, Ohio and Evansville.
The streak has taken a toll.
“The two losses, people say they’re excited for things, but the two losses, practice wasn’t the best this week,” Kiser said. “I’ll leave it at that.”
Kiser wasn’t speaking out of turn.
Valparaiso coach Matt Lottich expressed his emotion. The Crusaders were without Tevonn Walker, sidelined with mononucleosis, for the second straight game, and they’re in finals week. But he was upset with their effort.
“We can look at X’s and O’s and executing, but we didn’t compete very hard,” Lottich said. “I don’t want to make any excuses — we just have to get better and we have to compete at a much higher rate. We just did not do that.
“We challenged our guys in the locker room. We have to be better. We have to execute better and we have to compete better. There’s not going to be exceptions. Guys are either going to do it or they’re not going to play.”
Northwestern (7-4) led by as many as 39 points. The Wildcats shot 6-for-6 from 3-point range in the opening seven-plus minutes, and finished 54.5 percent (12-for-22) from three. Vic Law scored 15 points in less than seven minutes, including 4-for-4 from 3-point range.
“We didn’t rotate out of our ball-screen defense,” Lottich said. “We had one guy who rotated well and that was John Kiser. Other than that, our guys just stood there and watched.
“We had a very good player hit four threes, we gave up 20 points in the first media segment. That hasn’t been who were are. We’ve been an elite defensive team and we were not (Thursday).”
Kiser, who got his first start of the season after freshman Parker Hazen had been in the lineup for each of the first 10 games, was at a loss to explain the Crusaders’ defense.
“We just weren’t flying around,” Kiser said. “We weren’t rotating. We had no energy. Nobody was talking.”
The Crusaders also struggled on offense, including another 21 turnovers. They had a stretch of 8:20 in the first half without a basket, and another stretch of 8:36 spanning the halves, including the first 6:53 of the second.
“We are not able to execute right now,” Lottich said. “We are having trouble dribbling, we are having trouble passing, and it hurts. We ran pretty much everything through Tevonn and with his absence, we’ve had other guys try to step up. It’s been pretty tough.
“It didn’t look like our guys had fun playing basketball, and this game is supposed to be fun. If you’re going to play, play hard.”
Northwestern coach Chris Collins liked his team’s performance.
“I’m really proud of our guys,” he said. “We have amazing respect for Valpo. It’s a winning program, Valpo has a winning tradition. That’s one of the reasons we wanted to schedule the game.”
Valparaiso plays at Santa Clara on Monday and California-Riverside on Wednesday to close nonconference play.
“Hopefully, we can have a little (meeting) out there and figure something out,” Kiser said.
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