For 78 years, Northwestern basketball was the answer to the saddest trivia question in the sport: the only power-conference program never to reach the NCAA tournament. The Wildcats wore that drought through decade after decade of Big Ten basement winters — until 2017, when Chris Collins' team finally broke through, held off Vanderbilt 68-66 in a first-round thriller, and gave Evanston its first taste of March. The celebration felt like a championship. For Northwestern, it was.
The breakthrough proved it was no fluke. Northwestern returned to the tournament in 2023, beating Boise State for a first-round win before falling to UCLA, and danced again in 2024 with an overtime win over Florida Atlantic. Three tournament trips in eight years: the impossible had become routine. The 2017 first-rounder still deserves its own chapter — with the 78-year drought on the line, Vanderbilt's Matthew Fisher-Davis committed a now-infamous intentional foul in the final seconds, and the Wildcats held on 68-66. Evanston erupted. Seventy-eight years of waiting, ended in one delirious weekend.
Welsh-Ryan Arena, the renovated bandbox on Lake Michigan, gives the Wildcats one of the Big Ten's most intimate home courts. When Northwestern is good, the students pack the place and the building shakes — a far cry from the half-empty mausoleum of the dark years. Collins, the former Duke star, brought pedigree and belief to a program that had neither. His teams play smart, tough, defensive basketball — the kind of style that travels in March and frustrates blue bloods.
But the last two seasons have tested that faith. Northwestern went 15-19 in 2025-26, 5-15 in the Big Ten — its first losing season in four years — and missed the NCAA tournament for the second straight year. The Wildcats fought hard to the very end, beating Indiana late in the regular season and again in the Big Ten tournament before bowing out in the tournament's third round. The glass was the killer: per BartTorvik, Northwestern finished 259th nationally in offensive rebounding percentage and 330th in defensive rebounding — dead last in the Big Ten on the defensive glass, the worst rebounding team of the Collins era.
The man carrying everything was Nick Martinelli, and he is gone. The forward averaged 23 points per game last season, earned All-Big Ten second-team honors for the second straight year, and exhausted his eligibility before being drafted by the New York Knicks in the second round. Northwestern's offense ran through Martinelli; replacing 23 points a night is the defining task of the 2026-27 season.
Collins didn't just lose Martinelli. The transfer portal gutted the roster: Arrinten Page (10.2 points per game) left for Providence, Jayden Reid (10.1) for Memphis, Tre Singleton (7.6) for Iowa State, Max Green (4.3) for Charleston, Jordan Clayton (3.9) for UMass, K.J. Windham (3.5) for James Madison and Tyler Kropp (3.1) for Washington State, with Justin Mullins and Gus Hurlburt also out of eligibility. Per barttorvik.com, Northwestern returns just 39.9 percent of its minutes — eighth in the Big Ten. This is a total rebuild wearing a familiar uniform.
The returners are young: junior guard Angelo Ciaravino (6.3 points per game) is the top returning scorer, sophomore guard Jake West (5.3) showed real promise, and sophomore Phoenix Gill rounds out the holdovers. Northwestern extended Collins this offseason — a bet on continuity over change — and now he has to mold a nearly new roster into something that defends like his best teams did. The DBPR numbers from last year say the defensive juice has to come from somewhere new.
The portal harvest was at least productive. The headliner is grad forward Jack Karasinski, who averaged 21.7 points on 56.1/41.5/80.7 shooting splits at Bellarmine last season — the 13th-most prolific scoring average in the country — and could immediately become the offense's focal point. He is joined by grad guard LA Pratt (17 points per game at Northeastern), grad forward Colin Smith (11.9 at UC Santa Barbara), forward Luke McEldon (11.7 at Mount St. Mary's), forward Okku Federiko (8.6 at Drake), forward Ryan Soulis (5.8 at Columbia), sophomore guard Aleksej Kostic — a lights-out shooter from BYU — and Penn grad guard Dylan Williams, who projects as the primary ball-handler.
The freshman class adds upside: Jayden Hodge, a four-star guard ranked No. 90 nationally by 247Sports, arrives after a knee injury during his senior year at Montverde Academy; Symon Ghai is a 7-foot-3 center with real paint presence; and Elijah Eschmeyer adds frontcourt depth. If Hodge is healthy, he could be the steal of the class — the kind of talent Northwestern has rarely signed out of high school.
So what is Northwestern in 2026-27? A program betting that a patchwork roster can defend and rebound its way back to relevance. The returning-minutes number says this will take time, and the Big Ten — home to the defending national champions — offers no soft landings. But Evanston has learned patience, and it remembers what 78 years of waiting felt like. Nobody at Welsh-Ryan takes March for granted. The climb back starts now.
