Get Up Close & Personal With Northwestern's Elite Men's Basketball Revival!
A new era comes with new concerns.
Let’s not sugarcoat it, the 2025-26 basketball season wasn’t the best for Northwestern. A 5-15 record in conference that had two separate five-plus game losing runs, multiple blown second-half leads, and a bow out of the Big Ten Tournament in uncompetitive fashion. It’s a far cry from the back-to-back March Madness dances the Wildcats saw in seasons prior.
A season like that realistically tempers expectations for the next campaign, and that’s not even considering a top 10 scorer in program history graduating. There are many justifiable questions that ‘Cats’ fans have coming into the 2026-27 season. Where will the (Nicky) buckets come from?
The two most prolific scoring seasons in program history. The highest-scoring Big Ten Tournament performance by a Northwestern player. The most 20+ point games by an active B1G player, the most 25+ point games in the conference this season.
Three game-winners in the last two years, and a really nice bobble head to boot. Replacing Nick Martinelli’s scoring output will be, in complex basketball terminology, very hard. The situation looks even more bleak when you look at the only game the team played without Martinelli this season.
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