Mackey Arena is rarely fun for visiting teams, and that was again the case on Wednesday.
Ohio State left West Lafayette, Indiana, with a 67-60 loss to Purdue. It dropped them to 5-1 on the season after five straight wins out of the game.
To recap what happened, we’re breaking out Five Things.
Inconsistent Outside Shooting A Trend
Ohio State has played six games, and it’s shot the ball worse than 30 percent from behind the 3-point arc in three of them, including the most recent two.
Against Purdue, the Buckeyes were just 6-of-24 from 3-point range. To make matters worse, they hit only one of their last six attempts and made one triple in the last eight minutes of the game where those late 3s really mattered.
“I feel like everybody shoots those same shots each and every game. I feel like our team knows each other very well and the shots they can make,” CJ Walker said. “And the shots that they take, we're very confident in those. It's just the flow of basketball, and it happens. Some days you're hot. Some days you're not. Every game is not going to be the same. It's just a matter of stepping up with confidence and just shooting it and believing that every shot's going in. Unfortunately, today they just didn't fall.”
Also unfortunately for the Buckeyes: It’s becoming a bit of a trend. Needless to say, that’s not optimal for a team with leading scorer E.J. Liddell (mononucleosis) and Seth Towns (knee) still on the bench.
Duane Washington Jr. (2-for-9) and Justin Ahrens (1-for-4) combined to go 3-of-13 from 3-point range which will always be an issue when the rest of the team doesn't include many knockdown shooters. Sueing, despite being in the low 30-percent range at Cal, made 2-of-5 3s on Wednesday and has shot 40 percent from outside through six games. But beyond those three players, the quartet of CJ Walker, Kyle Young, Musa Jallow and Gene Brown are a combined 7-for-40 from 3 this year.
Altogether, Ohio State ranks 155th nationally with a 3-point percentage of 33.1, which is a mark that has to get better.
Nearly A Game-Changing Play
Once Purdue went up by 14 points on an Eric Hunter Jr. 3-pointer with 8:36 remaining, it became clear that the result was nearly in hand. The Boilermakers had a 96.2 percent win probability following the triple.
Yet Ohio State, to its credit, made it somewhat interesting near the end. And one play stands out among all of the others for the Buckeyes.
Freshman big man Zed Key, with a little under three minutes remaining, grabbed an offensive rebound on a missed CJ Walker floater and rose to put up a follow-up shot from just outside the circle that also hit the rim and fell out. He careened to the ground, but by keeping his head up, he volleyball-slapped the ball to Walker who fired it to Duane Washington Jr. who drilled an open 3-pointer that suddenly chopped the deficit to six points.
“I think that it was a big play,” Holtmann said. “It was a big play. I think it cut it to, what, two possessions or six points. It was a good play.”
Had the rest of the game gone a different way, that play would have been pulled out and touted as the one that swung the game late. Ultimately, it didn’t change the outcome, so it might be forgotten.
But what shouldn’t get glossed over is the solid conference play debut made by Key, a 6-foot-8, 245-pound freshman getting his first taste of Big Ten big men. He didn’t do anything crazy, managing only five points (2-of-6) and three rebounds – all on the offensive end – in 22 minutes largely matched up with Trevion Williams and 7-foot-4 Zach Edey. Still, he was physical, made an important play down the stretch and worked his ass off. There’s stuff to work with.
“He's making real progress for us. He's figuring out,” Holtmann said. “That's a lot for a freshman in a Big Ten game, particularly when you're going against an all-league post guy.”
End-of-game Oomph
A real issue for the Buckeyes down the stretch was their inability to score and get over the hump.
“I did not think we played with enough poise in the last five minutes of the game offensively when it was a two-possession game,” Holtmann said.
Following Key’s tap and Washington’s triple with 2:54 to go, the Buckeyes didn’t make another shot from the field. Not one. And they were right there with the Boilermakers, too, holding them to a single made field goal.
Ohio State’s four offensive possessions down the stretch when it most needed buckets ended with:
- An open corner 3-pointer from Washington that he couldn’t connect on and a missed followup dunk by Young.
- Sueing fumbling the ball, causing a self-inflicted turnover.
- Washington getting a good look on a well-run set that gave him a pull-up 3-pointer that he missed followed up Sueing getting the offensive board and hitting the bottom of the rim on the put-back layup attempt.
- Sueing missing a contested triple in the corner that he had to take with time dwindling and Key grabbing the offensive rebound and getting fouled on the way up with 23 seconds remaining in an eight-point game.
That’s not even accounting for Sueing not chasing after a loose ball that the officials ruled having gone off of Ohio State, which gave possession back to Purdue instead of beginning a Buckeye fast break.
Ohio State wasn’t a great end-of-game team with the ball in its hands a season ago, and that’s clearly an area it needs to work on. Players had ample chances, took open shots and grabbed offensive rebounds, but the execution wasn’t there.
New Starters? Not Really
If you looked onto the court at the beginning of the game and thought, “Wait a second, what’s going on?” you probably weren’t alone. For the first time this season, Holtmann made a significant adjustment to his starting five, pulling seniors CJ Walker and Kyle Young out to give the beginning of the game a new look. Ohio State's starters were:
- Jimmy Sotos
- Duane Washington Jr.
- Musa Jallow
- Justice Sueing
- Zed Key
It was the first career start for Key and first start as a Buckeye for Sotos.
Holtmann has often stressed – and again stressed after the game – that the starting lineup will be fluid this season. But fluid in the sense that he’d pull two seniors who started 54 combined games last season from the starting lineup? An unexpected twist, to say the least.
The way Holtmann explained it, first pointing to a similar decision by Purdue head coach Matt Painter having Trevion Williams come off the bench the past two games, the move of Young and Walker going to the bench to start the game was just “coaching our team.”
“They're great kids,” Holtmann said. “Terrific kids. They're great leaders. It is what it is. It's guys, they responded like I knew they would. They know we need more out of them if we're going to have a good team. We need more out of Kyle Young and CJ, and those guys responded. I thought they both had really good moments tonight.”
Quite clearly, it was a challenge to the veterans.
How do we know that? Because they essentially explained the reasoning the same way when asked about it separately.
- Walker: “He just wanted us to play harder, be more leaders on both sides of the ball, be more vocal, more effort. He just wanted to make that statement that we needed to play harder and a reality check to not play entitled and things like that.”
- Young: “That was just for us to be better leaders on the defensive end and offensive end. For me, got to play tougher. Got to play at a higher level.”
If Holtmann goes back to the film and thinks Walker and Young led the team better, it would make sense to see them back in the starting five the next time they take the court. If not, as he showed on Wednesday, he’ll be fine to have them sitting in folding chairs when Saturday’s game tips off.
Overreactions
Sometimes, it feels like individual losses can turn into a referendum on the season, team, program or head coach. Don’t make that mistake after the first Big Ten game of the season in mid-December with multiple key contributors missing against an opponent with abnormal size in the frontcourt playing on its home court. Yes, there are things to learn. Of course. But if anybody’s projecting what happens in this season or to this program based largely on what happened on Wednesday in West Lafayette, you’d be making a mistake.
I wrote about how this season is the ultimate work in progress, and that hasn’t changed in a two-week span.
As long as it all doesn’t fall off the tracks completely, this is a team that can – and absolutely should – get better over the course of the season. It will get healthier, thus becoming deeper with more lineup combinations, and hopes to have the newcomers ingratiate themselves to Big Ten basketball. That won’t happen overnight – or in one or two weeks. It’s all one big process with a bunch of moving parts. But if things go as hoped, this will be a much-improved team by the time March rolls around.
“We've got a quick turnaround,” Holtmann said, referring to the upcoming game Saturday against UCLA, a new opponent. “We've got to just look at it, see where we can get better and take those steps moving forward.”
