The hits just keep coming for Northwestern basketball.
Just a week after losing star guard Brooks Barnhizer, BTN announced on Saturday night, before the Wildcats' tipped off against Washington, the news that Wildcat fans were dreading: starting point guard Jalen Leach is out for the rest of the season with a torn ACL.
Leach injured his right knee against USC on Tuesday night, when went down awkwardly on a drive to the basket late in the second half of the Wildcats’ 77-75 win. He immediately grabbed his knee before being led off the floor. Sources said that he underwent an MRI on Wednesday.
Leach's season ends with him averaging 14.4 points and a career-high 3.4 assists, but those numbers undersell just how tremendous the transfer became in the heart of Big Ten play.
The 6-foot-4 combo guard had his struggles early in the season with ball pressure from physical programs like Dayton or Penn State, but in the five games before his injury, Leach was averaging 19.4 points and 5.4 assists per game. He had put together one of his best games of the season — 23 points, seven rebounds and seven assists — in his last full game against Wisconsin, which was the Wildcats’ first game without Barnhizer.
Leach struggled with 2-for-10 shooting and scored just 6 points in his final game against the Trojans, but he made up for it with a team-high six assists and just one turnover. It's a bitter shame that Leach's season comes to a close in such an abrupt fashion when he was quickly becoming one of the team's latest transfer success stories.
With the loss of Barnhizer and Leach, the Wildcats have now lost two of their top three scorers on the season, and their top two in assists. Barnhizer, a senior, missed the last two games with a broken foot; like Leach, both his season and Northwestern career are over.
Ballhandling figures to be a challenge for the Wildcats as Leach and Barnhizer brought the ball up and initiated the offense more than anyone else. Northwestern led USC by 9 when Leach went down with 5:26 remaining. The Trojans made quick work of the lead down the stretch and tied the game before Martinelli sunk a heroic game-winning shot in the final seconds.
In a surprising move, the Wildcats started Jordan Clayton in Leach's place in the starting lineup against Washington. Clayton hadn't appeared in a game all season but the program decided to burn his redshirt with eight games left in the season.
Ty Berry, leading-scorer Nick Martinelli and freshman KJ Windham will also share some of the ballhandling load.
The Wildcats will also struggle to score moving forward, as Barnhizer and Leach accounted for 31.4 points per game between the two of them. Martinelli is already averaging 19.7 points per game and was the Big Ten's third-leading scorer going into Saturday night's game, but he will have to increase his shot volume and scoring for the Wildcats in these final stretch of games.
Collins said on Wednesday night that he wouldn't be critical of any shot that Martinelli takes, and he meant it. It took 25 shots for Martinelli to collect his game-high 27 points against USC, to go along with his 13 rebounds.
The Wildcats' will have to rely on a committee of players to pick up the rest of the scoring slack. Justin Mullins, who had been buried on the bench for most of the year but provided a big spark against USC with a career high in minutes (37) and points (14), got the start against Washington in place of Angelo Ciaravino. Ty Berry (8.8 ppg), Ciaravino (3.6) and Windham (3.0) will all have to increase their production.
Without Barnhizer and Leach, Northwestern will have to "muck up" games by playing tough defense, slowing the pace, limiting the number of possessions and keeping scores low. The Wildcats are already near the bottom of the Big Ten at No. 16 with 74.0 points per game, but they'll now want to play games in the 60s.
The one thing that Northwestern won't be able to replace is the experience that Barnhizer and Leach brought to the roster. The Wildcats lost 209 games of experience between the two of them. That's 141 more games than the quartet of Mullins, Ciaravino, Windham and Clayton had combined before the tipoff against the Huskies.
The Wildcats were on the furthest outskirts of the NCAA Tournament bubble before Barnhizer and Leach went down. Now, a berth in the Big Ten Tournament is the primary goal.
But with any chance for a historic third straight March Madness dashed, the focus of the remaining games of the season are on the future and developing the players who will lead what they hope will be the program's next run of bids.
