As the buzzer sounded on Northwestern’s 86-82 loss to Ohio State, Nick Martinelli stood alone on the Welsh-Ryan Arena court with his jersey collar covering half his face, hands first on his knees and then behind his head in disbelief. After the NU senior forward scored a game-high 32 points, his teammates guided him to the Wildcats’ bench.
Following Northwestern’s third consecutive loss, the second one decided by fewer than five points, Martinelli made his disappointment known to the postgame media.
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“I’m sick of losing,” Martinelli said, deadpanned and looking down. “That’s just not what this program is about. That’s just not who we are.”
Martinelli, the only current Northwestern men’s basketball player who got considerable minutes on its 2022-23 and 2023-24 NCAA Tournament rosters, pulled from the past. He referenced the injury-riddled 2024-25 season, where Brooks Barnhizer and Jalen Leach were sidelined, an “excuse” that he said the team didn’t have now. He and sophomore forward Angelo Ciaravino mentioned previous wins in which the Wildcats did as they were told and won as a result.
On Saturday, Martinelli didn’t feel like that happened.
“Coach [Chris Collins] took accountability for the defense. It’s the players, it’s not Coach,” Martinelli said. “I just think it’s tragic, the amount of talent that we have. And it hurts, man, it hurts. It’s my senior year, and this isn’t about me at all, but I have such an urgency right now. We just have to fix it and just listen and do the things that we’re told, like the other guys that I played with in the past.”
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Anyone who watched Northwestern play Ohio State would understand why Martinelli felt the way he did. The game wasn’t like Wisconsin, where the Wildcats were outplayed from start to finish. This was a match in which they led by as many as nine points in the second half, shot above 50% from the field for much of the game and put up 82 points. A match that was a one-possession game with 24 seconds left, where Northwestern had the ball, but Martinelli missed a free throw that rebounded into the hands of OSU’s Christphy Tilly.
A match inside a Northwestern fan-dominated Welsh-Ryan Arena, against a team that the ‘Cats beat three times in a row before Saturday, including by 21 points last season. Corroborated with audible anger from the purple-and-white crowd over officiating, as well as similarly hair-pulling losses against Virginia and Oklahoma State and it may seem like “doomsday” – as head coach Chris Collins described.
In a college basketball landscape where handfuls of teams are fighting on the bubble and a “resume win” can make or break a squad, that sentiment can be justified from the outside.
“I know there’s going to be a doomsday, that’s what you guys have to do,” Collins told reporters. “This is a doomsday world. I told the guys that very same thing — I said, I’ll walk into the media and everybody’s going to jump off the boat.”
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Much criticism of Northwestern is legitimate, most definitely on the defensive side. In fact, Martinelli said that poor defensive performance was the “only thing” keeping the team from winning. The Wildcats gave up a whopping 63 points in the paint, constantly falling victim to Ohio State’s layups that immediately followed their own scores. This included the 19 the Buckeyes scored on fastbreaks.
Buckeye senior Brandon Noel, who played just nine minutes and scored no points in OSU’s last contest against Pitt a week ago, led his team with 29 points. After positioning himself in an open middle lane that Northwestern often couldn’t guard, he made himself a major issue for the Wildcats.
Both Collins and Ohio State head coach Jake Diebler said that Noel’s role changed on Saturday, as he shifted from his typical wing position to play center. And while that could have thrown a wrench in the Wildcats’ scouting plans, their issues clearly went beyond one player.
“We’re not giving up a lot of resistance on that end of the floor,” Collins said of the NU defense. “We’re not making teams go to their plan B, plan C. We’re getting beat with their K.O. punches and that’s what we’ve got to do a better job of.”
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Alongside the bad, like Northwestern’s defense and its several over-three-minute scoring droughts, there was also good. That included the team’s turnaround late in the first half to take the lead into halftime, Ciaravino’s three dunks in three minutes and Martinelli matching his career high. After a week that Collins said was plagued by team sickness (possibly why freshman forward Tre Singleton, a usual starter, played just eight minutes Saturday), the ‘Cats now have a week off before taking on Jackson State.
That week of practice, as well as seemingly less difficult future home opponents in Jackson State and Valparaiso, gives Northwestern a chance to reset and possibly restore confidence by returning to the win column. Because as much as these early losses aren’t ideal, the ‘Cats still have the most important stretch of their season well ahead of them.
“Any time you lose two, you lose a little confidence,” Collins said. “Like you get shaken a little bit. And so I’ve got to keep these guys’ confidence up.”
And that ties back to why, ultimately, Marintelli had a big-picture view. Despite opening his postgame press conference by airing his frustration, he closed it by embracing the challenges ahead and putting everything into perspective.
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Martinelli brought up blowout losses to Ohio State and Pitt during the 2022-23 season, which served as stepping stones for the wins that followed. He expressed his gratitude for being able to play Big Ten basketball in the first place. And finally, he emphasized that Northwestern’s season wasn’t over just because it lost two conference games.
“You don’t get any glory from just constantly winning life,” Martinelli said. “You get glory from getting your face shoved in the mud, and you getting up and pushing. And that’s the message that I need for these guys to understand.”
