Seth Towns had checked into his first-ever Big Ten game 16 seconds prior to him reaching both of his arms out to grab a loose ball under the basket. Taking one dribble to position himself just outside of the lane on the left side of the hoop, he rose up for a short fadeaway over an outstretched Ron Harper Jr.’s flailing left arm.
All net.
That basket to chop Rutgers lead down to 53-40, cutting into a deficit Ohio State eventually overcame for an 80-68 victory, was the first make for Towns in 1,018 days. Not since the Ivy League championship game on March 11, 2018, the fateful day when the then-Harvard sharpshooter suffered the knee cartilage injury that forced him to miss two full seasons, had he connected on a shot.
“Really happy for him,” head coach Chris Holtmann said after the win. “His first couple points as a Buckeye in a game that we really needed it.”
Former Ivy League POY @seth_towns17 scores his first @OhioStateHoops points. pic.twitter.com/hhSLfUizxq
— Big Ten Network (@BigTenNetwork) December 23, 2020
Towns’ contributions on Wednesday were fairly minor. He played a grand total of six minutes, with all of them coming in the second half. But he did score four points off a pair of offensive rebounds, grabbing two other defensive rebounds and recording a plus-10 in his time on the court.
More so than anything else about the game, what really mattered for Towns was the mere fact that he was playing again.
The Buckeyes brought the 6-foot-8, 230-pound forward back to his hometown of Columbus for his fifth season of college basketball with the understanding they’d have to deal with unknowns that come with somebody who’s working his way back from a significant injury. They did so with the idea that provided he eventually returns to the 2017-18 form that led to him becoming the Ivy League Player of the Year as a true sophomore at Harvard, he’ll be a big part of what they want to accomplish.
Wednesday, six-minute spurt followed Towns’ debut for Ohio State when he played a pair of scoreless minutes against UCLA on Saturday.
“I thought he played hard. I thought he played hard and competed,” Holtmann said. “Defensively, he's got to get better. We had to sub (him) out just because they were attacking off the dribble a little bit. But that will as he moves and gets in better shape. I thought he really competed, which is what we've seen Seth do is compete. He's going to shoot the ball really well, especially when he gets his legs under him. But what he did today is just keep balls alive. He competed on both ends.
“I thought he did a tremendous job. Again, you're talking about a young man that has been on the scout team and continues to be on the scout team and will continue to be that until he can shake some rust off.”
The shaking off of the rust is the stage Towns is at, and it’s what he’s been doing since at least November when he began live action practices.
How long will he be doing this? When will he be ready for a full-time spot in Holtmann’s rotation. Nobody quite knows.
The only true answer is that Towns isn’t at that point yet and, after such a lengthy recovery, there’s no rush.
“He's not ready to play a significant amount of minutes,” Holtmann said. “He's just not. He's not physically quite ready for that. He's not in the shape to do that. Again, It's going to be a slow process. I think people hopefully have understood that by now, that the young man has worked really hard to get back to this point but it's not a situation where he's necessarily ready to play significant minutes, Big Ten minutes. That might be a while.
“Who knows when that will be? I'm not going to put a timeline on it. But it's not right now. He's just got to continue to put in good work day after day.”
