Northwestern women’s basketball is my favorite team at Northwestern to follow. They’re very good, play a breakneck pace, and are generally just fun.
They also have a rather important season coming up.
The trifecta of Ashley Deary, Christen Inman, and Nia Coffey are all entering their senior season. Coffey is the undisputed best player of the three and one of the top five players in the conference hands down. Deary is a steal waiting to happen and a crafty pass first point. Inman provides a silky midrange game and a smoothness that disguises her hyper athletic game. Those three, along with since departed Alex Cohen and Maggie Lyon, provided the core of Northwestern’s NCAA team a few years back. To get to the dance just one time with this group of three All-Big Ten level players would, it has to be said, be a disappointment.
Filling out the rest of the lineup will be some combination of returning role players, promising youngsters, and various degrees of unknown quantities. The Big Ten looks fairly gettable this year with Michigan State replacing Aerial Powers and Minnesota replacing Rachel Banham. The top tier of the conference exists on another plane of existence. Maryland still brings back the best center in the conference in Brionna Jones, the best player in the conference in Shatori Walker-Kimbrough (miss me with your Kelsey Mitchell takes), and has five 5-star recruits coming in. Seriously. Ohio State is equally unreachable, even if Northwestern appears to be their bogey team. Indiana was projected to finish 3rd, but outside of Tyra Buss and her James Harden-esque ability to “draw contact,” there’s not that much scary about the Hoosiers. The 2nd tier of the Big Ten is completely there for Northwestern’s taking. But do they have the firepower to get there?
Who’s gone?
Maggie Lyon, Christen Johnson
Christen Johnson started the year as the starter at the center spot but finished the season behind Pallas Kunaiyi-Akpanah, Allie Tuttle, and Maya Jonas (when healthy) in the rotation, so her departure won’t be a deciding factor in this season, at least in terms of on the court production.
Maggie Lyon is a very different story.
Lyon will go down as one of the most productive players in Northwestern women’s basketball history. An instant impact player as a streaky shooting freshman, Lyon developed into a plus rebounder, a solid defender who could matchup against bigger forwards, and an on court leader. Playing through an injury, Lyon still led the team in three pointers made, shooting at a 33% clip that belies how much her outside shot had to be respected. She was the one true perimeter gunner on the roster and her presence on the court opened up the floor for Northwestern’s other scorers. Players guarding Lyon couldn’t help on Inman or Coffey drives. Take away Lyon, and there weren’t any shooters on the team. Coffey is still not a threat from the three point stripe, Ashley Deary’s corkscrew release didn’t hit the 30% mark in conference play, Inman is far more comfortable from the mid range, and Lydia Rohde never found her shooting stroke. Not only will Northwestern have to replace 16.5 points and 6 rebounds a game, they’re going to have to adjust to a post-spacing world. Unless one of the newcomers can make a difference.
Who are the new people?
Abi Scheid (FR), Abbie Wolf (FR), Byrdy Galernik (FR), Bry Hopkins (FR), Oceana Hamilton (R-JR), Lauren Douglas (GR)
If nothing else, this year’s team is going to have a lot more people on it.
Lauren Douglas isn’t really a new face. She and Maggie Lyon came to Evanston in the same class and were running mates for three seasons. But Douglas was forced to take an injury redshirt last season. If Douglas is back to 100%, she becomes an extremely interesting and valuable piece of this team. Douglas once finished in the top 10 in the conference in 3FG% and blocked shots. A modern forward, at her best, Douglas combines a smooth outside stroke with defensive versatility that allows her to guard 4 positions. But it remains to be seen whether her 42% 3FG number her sophomore year can be repeated. She shot 27.7% from deep in her other two seasons. Basketball is weird.
Abi and Abbie are both top 100 recruits who give a much needed backbone to Northwestern’s front line. Pallas Kunaiyi-Akpanah has a sky high athletic ceiling, but when asked to defend against the better centers of the conference, she wasn’t able to consistently keep post position without picking up fouls. Allie Tuttle provided some nice moments in the Big Ten Tournament and Maya Jonas did some neat things before getting hurt, but the center spot is very much open to competition. If the 6-4 Wolf can give the Wildcats 20 minutes a night, Joe McKeown will be very happy. Scheid on the other hand appears to be more in the Nia Coffey mold of a forward who can live on the perimeter. With Douglas and Coffey already on the depth chart, there might be a bit of a logjam at forward, but it’ll be difficult to leave Scheid on the bench. Oceana Hamilton, the transfer from Alabama, will also probably get minutes at the center spot.
The other two freshman probably won’t be asked to do a whole lot right away. There are plenty of forwards so unless Hopkins’ recruiting profile belies her ability, she doesn’t project to play anymore than Amber Jamison played last season. Quick burst, energetic defenders do have a role to be sure. Don’t sleep on Galernik though. Joe McKeown has a silly good hit rate with point guards. Don’t forget that Ashley Deary was little more than an afterthought in her recruiting class before she displaced Karly Roser and became the Big Ten’s best pest. Northwestern needs a second ballhandler, and don’t be surprised if Galernik ends up battling Jordan Hankins.
So how does this all fit together?
There are a couple of things we know:
- Deary, Inman, and Coffey will all start and play more than 30 minutes a night.
- Joe McKeown doesn’t usually go far down his bench.
- There are like 9 other players who are probably good enough to get on the court.
Northwestern was incredibly thin last season, but it looks like that script has been flipped on its head. Douglas, Kunaiyi-Akpanah, Scheid, Wolf, Hamilton, Jonas, Jamison, Rohde, and Hankins/Galernik would all have been good enough to get minutes on last year’s team. How they all fit together is going to develop throughout the season. Let’s try and find a starting 5.
OPTION 1: LET’S GO HUGE
I’m intrigued by this idea. If Northwestern wanted to, they could roll out Deary (5-4), Inman (5-10), Coffey (6-1), Douglas/Scheid (6-2), and Wolf (6-4). Northwestern consistently got battered on the boards last season. Throwing out a center, two stretch 4s and a big athletic guard alongside Deary would help fixing that problem. Of course, this lineup could also choke itself off, as Inman and Coffey would be pressed to find room to penetrate if Douglas isn’t shooting at least 35% from three.
OPTION 2: LET’S DO WHAT WE DID LAST YEAR
Joe McKeown could also play it safe. No one would cast a second glance at a Deary, Inman, Douglas, Coffey, Kunaiyi-Akpanah lineup. You hope Douglas can be a Lyon replacement, and hope that an offseason of development for Kunaiyi-Akpanah can help her guard the deep post and provide an occasional spark on offense. It’s safe and a little boring, but it wouldn’t be at all surprising. If I were a betting man, this is where my money would be.
Alright, Ben, but what about the bench?
Another good question! Let’s just say that the starting 5 is the Deary, Inman, Douglas, Coffey, Kunaiyi-Akpanah lineup. Deary, Inman, and Coffey will play about 35 minutes a night, but Douglas and Kunaiyi-Akpanah probably aren’t going much more than 25 and 20 minutes respectively. Abi Scheid is going to get significant run. Abbie Wolf and Oceana Hamilton will get shares of the minutes at center. The Hankins/Galernik hybrid will be used to spell Deary. McKeown seems to like playing Lydia Rohde, so she’ll probably get some play too. Amber Jamison provided something off the bench last season, will there be minutes for her this time around?
If Joe McKeown plays his traditional 7.5 person rotation, it’s easy to see players like Rohde and Jamison, to say nothing of Tuttle and Jonas, lose their spot in the rotation. Joe McKeown has a lot of frontcourt mouths to feed. But at the same time, there’s an opening or two for outside shooters in the rotation. If Jordan Hankins’ postseason shooting spree was legit, it wouldn’t be that surprising to see her slot alongside Deary in the backcourt, pushing Inman to the 3. Byrdy Galernik could provide a similar role. When Northwestern made the NCAA Tournament, McKeown started two lead guards in Deary and Roser.
Basically, the rotation will be kind of a clusterfuck until we know:
- How good the freshmen are
- How good of a shooter Lauren Douglas is
- How much Hankins/Jamison/Rohde have progressed
- How big Joe McKeown wants the rotation to be
We don’t know much at all, I guess.
OK, so how good is this team actually going to be?
The ceiling for this team is a 3rd place finish in the Big Ten and a decent seed in the NCAA Tournament. The floor is probably missing the tournament.
Looking at the floor is a little scary. First of all, despite all the talent plus Maggie Lyon, last year’s team was kind of bad. They gave up 80 points 5 times last season. They got waxed by a bad Penn State team. There were games where the defensive issues were more than just personnel mismatches. There were scheme problems (ducking under screens against Rachel Banham is not just bad, it’s disrespectful), communication problems, and just general badness for extended periods last year. If you want to be super pessimistic, you can even say that Ashley Deary, despite leading the league in steals, can overplay her hand, get caught out of position, and isn’t tall enough to bother shooters like Rachel Banham. But that’s getting awfully picky.
Offensively, Northwestern needs to find a shooter. It’s really hard to be good when you don’t have a single player who can hit 30% from three. Whether it’s improvement from Deary (27% in B1G play), Inman (27% in B1G play), or Coffey (29% in B1G play), more playing time for Jordan Hankins (6/10 from three in the Big Ten Tournament), one of the freshmen stepping in as a knockdown shooter, or the return of Good Shooting Lauren Douglas, something needs to change. If the numbers stay what they were last season, the offense could get choked out, no matter how good Nia Coffey is.
But the positives are really fun. If two of the new faces can contribute and Lauren Douglas is 90% of what she was before her injury, this team can be scary good. There are a ton of long athletes who can ruin lives in Joe McKeown’s “Blizzard” defense. 1 through 4, Northwestern is going to have good defenders. If Kunaiyi-Akpanah develops into a center who can body up Big Ten posts or if Hamilton or Wolf can do that job, there won’t be an exploitable weakness like there was last year. There’s depth that should keep the Wildcats from breaking down late in the season like they have in the past. Those are a lot of good things that don’t involve the fact that Nia Coffey is, at worst, the 5th best player in the league.
It’s way more likely that Northwestern is a great team than a bad team next season. And even if they are not great, they still play really enjoyable basketball to watch. I, for one, am entirely here for it.
Throw The Fade 