I would hope by now most Buckeye fans know enough about this years basketball team that I don’t need to rehash the same played out story lines. There is the ever popular “They need to find a second scorer” or the “They need a win against a top team to save their season”.
Thad Matta is in his 14th season as a HC and now has 14 straight years of at least 20 wins yet there are still people calling for him to be fired??? At least with 2 wins last week those “fans” are a lot quieter this week. What he has done at OSU has been tremendous all things considered going up against the juggernaut that is Buckeye Football. On top of that he has coached in what has arguably been the best basketball conference in the NCAA for the last few years. Coach Matta deserves a lot more praise and a lot less criticism in my humble opinion.
But having said that lets get to the game itself….
SCORE
Ohio State 68 – MSU 60
How we won this game?
Aaron Craft seems to be a lot like Coach Matta in the way the fans react to them. When things go well Craft is given lots of praise and when things go bad he takes most of the heat. This game Craft will get a huge amount of praise for shooting 7-12 and 7-8 on FTs in scoring 21 points a career high for Sir Swoons-A-Lot. He also contributed 6 assts and 3 rebs and 1 steal. He did all that while also staying out of foul trouble and leading this team to victory.
The other key to this victory was the way Evan Ravenel played coming in off the bench scoring 10 points on 2-3 shooting and 6-7 on FTs. He also contributed 5 rebs, 1 steal, and 1 block. he gave the team a much needed spark and energy boost when they were playing ho hum and losing.
How we nearly lost this game?
Garry Harris and Adriean Payne and Derrick Nix played as well as humanly possible they shot the ball well and rebounded it even better. They just didn’t have enough support from the rest of their team.
Here is where I am going to go on a bit of a tangent about DeShaun Thomas. He once again shot a horrible 4-12 and 2-7 from 3 point range. This kind of stat line seems to be the norm for DT this season and we just can’t have that from our best player night in and night out. In the last 5 games he has shot 25%, 37%, 47%, 35%, and 40% and that is killing this team.You just can’t have your best player taking more shots than he has points if you want to win big games. He has regressed as a shooter this year and as the man in this offense that revolves around we need him to make better decisions and shot selections. Hopefully he will get this figured out sooner rather than later as he is playing himself right out of the NBA draft and will need to return next year to get back in it at this point.
Conclusion
Overall this game was fun to watch and a great win. It continues to show this team can beat anyone when they control the tempo and play with heart and desire. There are only 3 games left in the regular season and only 1 game this week which is @ Northwestern on Thursday. They need to dominate that game start to finish and notch a road win to keep this momentum going into next weeks tough games @ Indiana and home against Illinois. Anything can still happen this year and OSU has the chance to make statements and make their case for why they should be a top 4 seed.
I have doubted Craft all season long (much to my chagrin) but it’s clear he is the key to the future success of this team. His ability to get to the rim was invaluable against MSU and he still had to be strong on D. Luckily Appling was still struggling, so he may not have had to work as hard.
Deshaun is a volume shooter, and he’s “volume of shots” has been a combination of poorly timed shots and forced “I need to hit something” shots. This team can’t afford to miss many shots, but sometimes DT needs to miss a handful to find his range. Clearly those two things are at odds and have the potential to be the downfall of this team.
Someone explained on twitter why Craft is so valuable…. In Basketball there are so many scorers they are a dime a dozen but a guy with Crafts defensive skills are rare and hard to come by and thats why he is so much more valuable as a player.
I will readily admit I dont see every shot that DT takes and have no idea how many are good shots that just missed but if he continues to struggle with his shot it will ultimately limit this teams post season possibilities.