About 90 minutes before tipoff last Sunday, Northwestern announced that three of its key players had sustained injuries and would be sidelined that night, as well as an unknown number of games moving forward.
Anthony Gaines is gone for the season with a shoulder injury, Boo Buie will likely be out for a matter of weeks after sustaining a stress fracture in his foot and AJ Turner will be shelved for a matter of days as he recovers from a thigh bruise.
The news was devastating to a Wildcat team that lost its fourth straight game against the Gophers that night and is still looking for its first Big Ten win of the season. They will be undermanned when they take on Indiana tonight in Bloomington, Ind., and for the rest of the season in some capacity.
The bad injury news shouldn't have been much of a surprise to veteran NU fans. For Northwestern, devastating injuries that derail a season are an almost annual occurrence for a program that seems to be snake-bitten. Some would even say cursed.
Gaines, a junior guard and team captain, will undergo shoulder surgery and, after playing in just 10 games, will likely apply for a medical hardship waiver to get his year of eligibility back.
Gaines will miss at least 21 games, making him the sixth Wildcat over the last five seasons to miss at least 20 games in one season. That means that Northwestern lost at least one player for two-thirds of the season due to injury in each of the last five seasons.
That's a lot of games. And in many cases, those players were stars.
In 2015-16, Northwestern had high hopes for an NCAA Tournament run with a good mix of veterans and youth when it announced before the season that Vic Law, a rising star sophomore and starting forward, would be out for the year after undergoing shoulder surgery. The team wound up winning 20 games and finishing 8-10 in the Big Ten. Would Law have put them over the hump a year earlier than they finally broke through?
It’s ironic that 2016-17, the year the Wildcats finally made the Big Dance, was the worst of head coach Chris Collins’ tenure in terms of injuries, with two players who missed more than 30 games.
Incoming freshman Rapolas Ivanauskas had year-ending shoulder surgery before the season even began. Sophomore Aaron Falzon then played in just three games before suffering a knee injury that shelved him for the rest of the year.
On top of that, Dererk Pardon missed eight early-season games with a hand injury and Scottie Lindsey missed four in February after coming down with mononucleosis. It’s a wonder that that squad became the greatest in school history, winning a school-record 24 games, including one in the NCAA Tournament.
In 2017-18, it was Ivanauskas again. He reinjured the same shoulder – what is it about Wildcats and shoulder injuries? – and was shut down after three games. Ivanauskas transferred to Colgate after the season, so he played a total of 11 minutes in his two-year Northwestern career.
Last year, it was Jordan Ash who suffered a knee injury in January and wound up missing the last 22 games of the season. He wound up transferring to Wright State for his final year.
This season, it’s Gaines who will miss more than 20 games. It remains to be seen how many games Buie will sit out, though Turner is expected back soon.
While Northwestern suffered its share of catastrophic injuries of 20 games or more, there were plenty of players who were shelved for fewer games in the Collins era. Some of them missed games over multiple seasons.
JerShon Cobb, now NU’s director of player development, missed eight games in 2013-14, in Collins’ first year, and 11 more the following season. Falzon had issues throughout his career, missing 33 games as a sophomore, four as a junior and 15 as a senior.
All those numbers add up. In all, Northwestern players have missed 261 games and counting in Collins’ six-plus seasons. That's about 42 player-games per year.
Here’s a look at them, season-by-season.
