On Thursday afternoon, just a few hours before Rutgers basketball took the court at Nebraska, Zach Martini’s phone started blowing up with bad news.
Filmmaker David Lynch, who was the subject of Martini’s senior thesis at Princeton University last year, had died.
“One of my inspirations in life,” Martini said of Lynch, whose movies “Twin Peaks” and “Mulholland Drive” are surrealist classics. “My thesis was 80 pages about him. I was listening to the music in his movies before the game.”
Sufficiently motivated, Martini turned in his best performance since arriving at Rutgers, scoring 11 points on 4-of-5 shooting as the Scarlet Knights upset Nebraska on the road.
It seems like a Hollywood turn of events, but the truth behind Martini’s emergence, as Rutgers takes a two-game winning streak to a crucial showdown at Penn State Monday (6:30 p.m., Peacock), is more straightforward.
“I know I have less than two months of college basketball left,” he said. “I’m going to go down fighting.”
The version of Martini that contributed to the past week’s wins over UCLA and Nebraska is what Rutgers coach Steve Pikiell envisioned while recruiting him as a postgrad – a 6-foot-8 catch-and-shoot threat who makes the right pass and can hold his own defensively.
Prior to UCLA, however, Martini’s shot had gone cold. He’d made just 2-of-11 3-pointers since Rutgers began facing high-major competition. And he sat for the entirety of the Scarlet Knights’ 18-point butt-kicking at home by Purdue, their third straight loss and a low point for a season that teetered on the brink.
The next day, Pikiell gathered his despondent players for a chat. The coach’s message: If they started playing together, instead of individually, they could realize their enormous potential during the second half of the season.
“We’re not dead yet,” Martini said, providing the CliffsNotes version. “We had to commit to a ‘we over me’ agenda.”
Martini responded with a spirited practice, and Pikiell told him: Be ready, we might need you against UCLA.
“He was proud of the way I practiced coming off the Purdue game, how I didn’t throw in the towel after not checking in,” Martini said.
How could he pout when fellow forward Dylan Grant, a freshman, had continued to grind it out even though he barely saw the court?
“He didn’t say a thing,” Martini said. “And he got his opportunity.”
Pikiell finally called Grant’s number two weeks ago, and Grant took it and ran. Given another chance, Martini followed suit. In addition to posting the team’s highest plus/minus against UCLA and second-highest against Nebraska, the Warren native and Gill St. Bernard’s alum was a valued voice in the huddle. No one in a Rutgers uniform has won more college basketball games – Princeton went 70-21 during his three seasons there, including NCAA Tournament triumphs over Arizona and Missouri.
The way Rutgers dissected Nebraska felt awfully familiar to him.
“A lot of the (offensive) actions are not that different between Princeton and Rutgers, but at Princeton we had one guy transfer out in my four years there,” Martini explained. “At Rutgers we have nine new guys on this team this year. It’s still a work in progress, but the off-ball spacing is finally clicking. Setting screens for each other, knowing where to pass out of the double-team – we’re finally getting the hang of it.”
As much as Martini would love to binge-watch David Lynch’s catalogue right now, his focus is on game film – and he’s noticed a difference in the film room as Rutgers (10-8 overall, 3-4 Big Ten) is figuring things out.
“When you watch film of these games and you start celebrating someone making the extra pass or celebrating someone passing out of a double team,” he said, “everyone starts to realize how important those things are and how they translate to winning.”
Jerry Carino has covered the New Jersey sports scene since 1996 and the college basketball beat since 2003. Contact him at jcarino@gannettnj.com.
