Chris Collins motioned for the crowd at the United Center to get on its feet as Nick Martinelli jogged off the court and straight into a hug with his coach with 51.8 seconds to play Thursday night.
Northwestern’s 6-foot-7 forward bowed his head to Collins’ shoulder and remained in the embrace for a long time, even as play on the court resumed for the final seconds of Purdue’s 81-68 win over the Wildcats. Then Martinelli went down the bench hugging every coach and teammate along the way.
The moment marked the end of four seasons at Northwestern for Martinelli, the last two the best scoring seasons ever for a Wildcat. Martinelli, a Glenview native, scored a program-record 759 points this season, topping his own record, and finished with 1,787 for his career.
“It’s just all love, everything he’s provided for me,” Martinelli said of Collins. “I can’t thank him enough. It’s been such a great ride. I know it’s really going to hit me randomly one of these next couple days just how much I’m going to miss it, but I’m so appreciative of him.”
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Northwestern (15-19) extended Martinelli’s career through the first two nights of the Big Ten Tournament with a win over last-place Penn State and an upset of 10th-seeded Indiana, which inexplicably has lost seven straight games to the Wildcats.
But their tournament run fizzled out in the third round against a Purdue team that was too big, too experienced and too deep for the Wildcats to handle.
Six-foot-11 Oscar Cluff had 19 points and 10 rebounds and 6-9 Trey Kaufman-Renn had 19 points and six rebounds to lift Purdue (24-8) into Friday’s quarterfinals against No. 2 seed Nebraska. The Boilermakers won the only meeting with the Cornhuskers this season, 80-77 in overtime on Feb. 10.
Martinelli finished his last Northwestern game with 25 points on 10-for-16 shooting, four rebounds and three assists.
Collins, who has known Martinelli since he was middle schooler attending his basketball camps, grew emotional when talking about his moment with Martinelli at the end.
“When you’ve coached over 100 games with somebody and had so many moments, it’s going through your head, the whole journey,” Collins said. “It’s super bittersweet because I’m so proud of him. To see the standing ovation he got and all those things is pretty cool, but it’s just a personal moment.
“I’ll be his biggest fan forever. I’m just sad I won’t have a chance to coach him anymore.”
Northwestern took Purdue to the wire on March 4 at Welsh-Ryan Arena, leading by a point with 1:03 to play before losing 70-66. But that was with 6-foot-11 forward Arrinten Page in the lineup.
Page missed his fourth game Thursday night with an undisclosed illness, from which Collins said he wasn’t medically cleared. Collins said Wednesday night after beating Indiana that he knew what the Wildcats were going to face without Page.
“I want to enjoy this win right now, and I just had visions of Kaufman-Renn and Cluff down low banging us with their big bodies,” he said then. “We know what’s ahead of us. We know how good this team is.”
Sure enough, Cluff and Kaufman-Renn were a nightmare from the start. They combined for 20 first-half points as the Boilermakers surged to a 45-21 halftime lead.
But it wasn’t all the big men.
A pro-Purdue crowd roared late in the first half when guard Braden Smith dived to keep a loose ball from going out of bounds, and Omer Mayer grabbed it to score a fast-break layup for a 38-15 lead. Smith finished with just five points but had a Big-Ten Tournament record 16 assists. He moved into second place all time in NCAA career assists with 1,045, behind Duke’s Bobby Hurley, who had 1,076.
The Boilermakers finished the game with a 35-23 rebounding edge and had 38 points in the paint.
Northwestern cut Purdue’s lead to 14 points twice with seven and six to play, but Kaufman-Renn and Cluff immediately answered with baskets. Northwestern freshman forward Tre Singleton also was playing with an injured wrist, Collins said.
“It really hurt us,” Collins said of Page’s absence. “To their credit, they took advantage of that. The post-ups was one thing, but it was the glass, the offensive boards, and we just didn’t have the size to combat it, especially when you’re on the third game in three days.”
The game was one of many tough ones for a young Northwestern team this season. The Wildcats brought back Martinelli, the two-time Big Ten scoring leader, but a mix of transfers and freshmen struggled to put it together behind him.
The Wildcats twice had five-game losing streaks in the Big Ten this season. But they won three of their last five regular-season games and opened the Big Ten Tournament with two wins before Thursday’s loss.
Collins praised the way Martinelli handled the season and his leadership of the young players despite the Wildcats failing to meet their goal of making the NCAA Tournament, as they did in Martinelli’s first two seasons.
“It wasn’t easy for him,” Collins said. “We had higher aspirations. We didn’t achieve our goals team-wise of what we wanted to do this year. We have no one to blame but ourselves. We lost a lot at the early part of the season. We didn’t take care of business with a lot of close losses.
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“We got to about a midpoint of the season, and it was kind of evident that it wasn’t going in a direction towards postseason. But his example of showing up every day as a senior and not making it just about him and not making it just about scoring records and winning a scoring title. It was always about winning. It was never about the individual stuff. It was about us getting better. It was about us trying to figure out how to win.”
Now Martinelli will be gone, and Collins said after the game that he needs to examine what he needs to do to assemble a new group for next season.
He pointed to Northwestern’s search for a new president as a key factor in garnering institutional support for the program. He also pointed to himself, saying he was “excited to roll up my sleeves and figure out how we can get back to the upper echelon of the league.”
“We didn’t have enough,” Collins said, noting he wasn’t knocking the players he did have. “We weren’t equipped with what we needed going through the grind of the Big Ten this year. I’m talking about myself. I’ve got to be better. We’ve got to do a better job with roster construction, making sure we get the right kind of guys that are going to be good players here.
“Also, a big part of it, it’s big business now, right? The alignment and studying what some of the programs are doing around us, especially peer programs, the level of investment. In order to win now at the high-major level, there’s got to be unbelievable alignment from everybody, not just the coaching staff. I mean that presidential level, you’ve got to want to compete in football and basketball, and you’ve got to invest, and it’s got to be important.”