For whatever reason, Northwestern’s Welsh-Ryan Arena — which looks more like a large high school gymnasium than a venue fit for a Big Ten basketball team — has flustered Thad Matta and Ohio State.
Not so much that it’s ever cost the Buckeyes, which hold an 11-1 record in Evanston, but it’s a strange phenomena between a conference power and conference doormat, where the last four games between these two schools in this place have been decided by a total of 16 points.
But it’s neither the size nor the din of the crowd that have appeared to give the Buckeyes particular trouble in the past. The arena — which seats a little more than 8,000 people — is a reflection of what Northwestern basketball is: a program that’s never made the NCAA Tournament.
And the fact the Buckeyes needed every one of freshman guard D'Angelo Russell’s career-high of 33 points to escape with a 69-67 win Thursday night is a reflection of Ohio State’s current condition...which isn’t all that bad but isn’t all that good either.
"Every team I’ve ever had here has found its stride — some better than others."
The Wildcats, which lost their fifth-straight game, hardly played well enough to win.
They didn’t shoot the ball well (44 percent from the floor) and they didn’t play the kind of defense necessary to contend against an opponent with superior athletes on the floor. That’s just life at Northwestern, academically one of the nation’s top schools, which is more like Harvard and Princeton than it is like the big state schools that make up the athletic league it belongs to.
Yet with less than a second to play, the Wildcats cut what was once an double-digit deficit to one point. And here was coach Thad Matta’s crew — the overlords of the Big Ten not long ago — clinging onto what it called a “must-need” win in mid-January.
About halfway through the season, it’s becoming clear that Ohio State, in its current state, is a middling a team with a lot of talent but more inexperience.
That’s what Ohio State is. What Ohio State can be is a dynamic squad that goes as far as Russell, its star freshman, takes it.
“We’re not in a rough patch, we’ve still gotta lot to learn right now. We’re still working on a lot right now.”
“We’re still rising right now; we’re nowhere near our peak,” Shannon Scott, the senior guard, said Wednesday. He added: “We’re not in a rough patch, we’ve still gotta lot to learn right now. We’re still working on a lot right now.”
That was evident in Evanston when the Buckeyes fell into an early 21-10 hole, even with a lineup change that included the additions of freshman Jae’Sean Tate and senior transfer Anthony Lee to jolt life back into a sleepy squad.
The Buckeyes mounted a furious rally to take back the lead late in the first half but cooled off in the game’s final 10 minutes. As a result, they barely escaped Northwestern’s late comeback.
“We know there’s not a lot of games left in the season, like we’re in Big Ten play,” Scott said. “Nothing’s gonna be easy anymore so everybody’s really ready to play every game now.”
Matta said: “I think our best basketball is hopefully ahead of us. But one of the things that we’ve talked about, in the five losses we’ve had, we’ve shown moments of playing really, really good basketball. Not perfect basketball, but just in terms of the cohesiveness, the synergy going in the right direction. The problem has been is we haven’t had it for the length or period of time that we need it — even in some games we won, we needed a surge here and there to sort of get us over the hump.”
Such was the case Thursday night. Such has been the case this season.
"Every team I’ve ever had here has found its stride — some better than others," Matta said. "But I think that’s one of the things we’re talking to these guys about is, you know, the ownership in terms of hey every night we take that floor, you’ve got a certain thing you have to do and you have a certain thing you have to bring to this team on this given night and we need it."