A 69-66 lead over Virginia with five minutes to play. A 58-54 lead over Oklahoma State with 10 minutes to play. A 61-56 lead over Ohio State with 13 minutes to play. And now, this Saturday night, a 67-60 lead over Minnesota with four and a half minutes to play.
“You try to condition and prepare your guys to be in a position where in those last four minutes you can be really solid on both ends of the floor. And we just weren’t that today,” head coach Chris Collins said. “We’re just not doing a really good job when we get those leads in the second half, of just putting our foot down and saying ‘This is our game and we’ve got to keep at it.’”
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Against Minnesota, Northwestern not only failed to keep the lead, but ’Cats basically handed the game to the visiting Golden Gophers. Over the final four minutes and 25 seconds of Northwestern’s first game of 2026, the Wildcats were outscored 24-11. Even worse than the continuous collapse — just how repetitive it was. Transition three pointers. Free throws. And dunk after dunk from Grayson Grove. The redshirt first-year, who had scored 28 points in his collegiate CAREER before Saturday, scored 12 points on 6-for-6 shooting. All six makes were dunks or layups.
“The middle pick-and-roll is just this simple but effective play. Obviously, they ran it continuously down the stretch,” Jayden Reid, who scored 19 points in the defeat, explained Saturday night. “We have to execute the gameplan. Grove was 6-for-6, all dunks. He affected the game.”
If the issue with the defense was merely a lack of execution — a problem with the head — that would be one thing. A lack of knowledge about proper pick-and-roll coverage is, in theory, fixable, as long as the team has lots of practice time and film sessions. According to Collins, the issue with the defense wasn’t a lack of size — a problem with the body — either. The issue with the defense is one of the most devastating issues any team can face — a problem with the heart.
“It’s heart, it’s toughness, it’s discipline. Those are things right now that we’re lacking,” Collins said. “Our problem is when it matters most, we’re not at our best.”
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The issue certainly wasn’t on the offensive end. Northwestern, as Collins himself noted, scored nearly 80 points, and cracked the 70-point barrier for the 13th time in 14 games (the Butler loss, which came without Nick Martinelli, being the only exception. The issue was Minnesota scoring on two-thirds of its second half possessions, including eight of nine possessions from the 6:01 mark to the 0:47 mark, a span that included five second-chance points and three dunks from Grove.
“Four or five of Grove’s layups were in the last five minutes. To me, that’s where you’ve just got to dig down,” Collins said. “We just couldn’t get any stops. That’s where you’ve got to be tough enough to really dig down and get stops when it matters. And we were just not doing that.”
Golden Gopher guard Langston Reynolds was the architect of Northwestern’s undoing on Saturday. The Northern Colorado transfer had reached double-digit assists just once in a Minnesota jersey before Saturday night. Against the Wildcats, he tallied a career-high 13 dimes, with eight of them coming after halftime. Four of those were in the final six minutes.
“I thought Reynolds was the star of the game,” Collins said. “He just controlled it. He was a playmaker. He rebounded, he got to the basket, he scored. Reynolds was fantastic.”
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Collins’ own lead guard, Jayden Reid, was fantastic as well. Reid cracked the 15-point barrier for the first time since Nov. 21 thanks to an efficient 6-of-12 shooting night, and he also handed out seven assists — his most since Nov. 23. But even with the stellar performance, Reid had no desire to be self-congratulatory after the defeat.
“Today I was like, ‘We’ve got to get our first Big Ten win.’ I came out with that mindset — play winning basketball,” Reid said. “I went out there and played winning basketball. The ball found me. I made some shots today. Still didn’t get the win. So really, it doesn’t matter.”
What does matter is that the Wildcats’ season is already on the brink. The same issue that plagued the team during Thanksgiving week, then reared its ugly head against Ohio State, then popped back up again against Butler — that same issue is still hanging over this team’s head. Through 14 games, there is no real reason to believe that this team has the same win-at-all-costs mentality that has been ingrained into past teams’ DNA. Nick Martinelli, who was a part of those teams, knows what that mentality looks like. And he knows he isn’t seeing it right now.
“I talked (in the locker room) about what it means to put on this jersey. I just think that we need guys out there that want to fight for this jersey, for one another,” a despondent Martinelli said postgame. “If you really care about it, then you’re going to go out there and fight your tail off. And if you don’t, you’re not going to play.”
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Collins’ demands for his team from the podium were simple: more urgency, more discipline, more heart. The first week of the new year is a great time to build better habits, work on yourself, and change the trajectory of your future. There’s only one problem with that. Even four days into the new year, Northwestern’s fatal flaw — its problem with the heart — may be impossible to fix.
