Las Vegas Invitational: Northwestern loses to Mizzou

There are going to be a lot of Northwestern basketball games like this one.

I liked what I saw from the Wildcats tonight. JerShon Cobb was a beast in the early going, singlehandedly keeping Northwestern in the game as they took a 39-34 lead into the half against Missouri in an almost entirely empty Orleans Arena in Las Vegas. He finished up with 22.

But the second half started off with a 14-0 Mizzou run, and NU's issues with depth started to show. Drew Crawford started having back spasms -- NO, NO NO NO NO NO, PLEASE BE HEALTHY, DREW, PLEASE -- and Sanjay Lumpkin, Alex Olah, and Nikola Cerina began to find themselves in foul trouble. The team the Wildcats trotted out with all those players unavailable for large swaths, well, wasn't a very good basketball team, and NU found themselves down by double digits pretty quickly. The Wildcats showed some fight, but it wasn't enough.

There's going to be some serious lump-taking over the course of this season. And, oh, man, tomorrow night against UCLA is not going to be fun.