Northwestern’s games are becoming mind-numbingly predictable. The Wildcats play good defense and give maximum effort, but their inability to put the ball in the basket – the most fundamental thing in basketball – leads to a loss.

On Saturday night, the Wildcats dropped their sixth straight game in the same fashion, this time to Nebraska, 59-50. Northwestern shot 34.5 percent from the floor and just 20 percent from beyond the arc.

The Wildcats were within 42-41 with 8:18 left after a dunk by Dererk Pardon, but they unraveled from there. Nebraska implemented a 1-3-1 zone and Northwestern got shut out for the next five and a half minutes as the Huskers scored 11 straight points to put the game out of reach.

That’s been par for the course for the struggling Wildcats, who watched their season record plunge under .500 at 12-13 and their Big Ten mark sink to a woeful 3-11, just one game out of the basement.

Head coach Chris Collins sounded like Captain Obvious after the game.

“We’re having a hard time scoring,” he said. “It’s been the script for us for most of the year… It wasn’t our defense. Our defense wasn’t the reason we lost. The reason we lost is we really struggled to score the ball.”

Northwestern has scored just 55.8 points per game on this six-game losing streak and broke 60 points just once. They also reached 40 percent shooting only one time, when they exploded for 79 points against Iowa.

Other than that one sterling performance against the Hawkeyes – in which they blew a 12-point lead with less than three minutes left – Northwestern's scoring and shooting numbers have been downright ugly.

It's pretty hard to beat anyone putting up offensive statistics like those.

As a result of their offensive blackout, the Wildcats now have the worst scoring offense in the Big Ten at 67.0 points per game. It’s a shame because the Wildcats are wasting one of the best defenses in the league, allowing just 64.5 points per game.

More importantly, when the streak began the Wildcats were 3-5 in the Big Ten and riding a two-game winning streak. They had what looked to be winnable games coming up against bottom-dweller Penn State, a Rutgers team they had already beaten on the road and a reeling Nebraska team that was in the midst of what would become a seven-game losing streak. If they won those three and then stole another one or two, the thinking went, the Wildcats could make some noise down the stretch and challenge for a post-season invitation.

Instead, the Wildcats lost all of them and are now in 13th place in the conference standings. The magical run to the 2017 NCAA Tournament seems as far away as summertime in Chicago.

Barring a minor miracle, this team will also finish as Collins' worst in Big Ten play. In six years, Collins’ worst Big Ten record at Northwestern is 6-12 (.333), a mark he reached three times, in his first and second years, and then again last season. This year the Wildcats will play 20 conference games for the first time, so to beat that winning percentage they will have to win four of their final six games – against Ohio State twice, Wisconsin, Minnesota, Illinois and Purdue – to finish 7-13 (.350).

Right now, if you'll pardon the double-entendre, it doesn’t look like Northwestern has a shot.