Ohio State head coach Thad Matta admitted Tuesday night he will be in a much better mood come Christmas Day. Had his team not performed the way it did against Mercer, he likely wouldn’t have had much Christmas spirit.
“All I know is I’m going to have a better Christmas than had we lost this game,” Matta said after the Buckeyes’ 64-44 win over the Bears on Tuesday. “Many years ago, we got pounded in this game down at Florida before [Christmas] and my wife actually sent me back to work because I wasn’t fun to be around.”
That won’t be the case this year.
Ohio State struggled throughout much of the first half against a pesky Mercer team which came into the game thinking it could win. The Buckeyes looked like they were still feeling the effects of that stunning upset win over 12th-ranked Kentucky on Saturday.
The Bears took it to Ohio State in the opening 10 minutes of the game before an 8-0 Ohio State run that was capped with a layup by JaQuan Lyle put the Buckeyes out front for the first time all evening. Still, though, Ohio State led by just one point at halftime, 25-24.
It was a completely different game in the second half, though, and the tone was set on the Buckeyes’ opening possession.
Despite the fact Ohio State had missed all nine of its first-half attempts from behind the 3-point line, the Buckeyes’ first field goal try of the second half was a Jae’Sean Tate shot from downtown. It clanged off the back of the rim — this was a trend for Ohio State throughout the evening — but Buckeyes center Trevor Thompson leaped up and flushed a put-back dunk with one hand. From there, Ohio State outscored Mercer 17-6 over the next seven-plus minutes of the second half and coasted to the win.
“I feel like we started to play harder late in the [first half] and we started to get a run, but we couldn’t pull away,” said Lyle, who finished with a game-high 18 points in one of the better performances of his young career. “The second half, we kept that intensity and continued to play hard and with the result we pulled away and got a 20-point win.”
Ohio State shot it at a level it hadn’t all season in Saturday’s stunning win over Kentucky; the Buckeyes were 9 for 18 from behind the 3-point line. On Tuesday night against Mercer, though, “We couldn’t throw it in the ocean,” Matta said.
Ohio State missed its first 16 attempts from downtown before Keita Bates-Diop got the team on the board from deep, connecting on a triple with 6 minutes, 26 seconds to play — the Buckeyes’ first made 3-pointer of the game.
With the shots not falling, Matta’s message to his team at halftime was quite simple. “We told them, ‘Hey, we may want to try and get as close to the basket as we can because the outside stuff isn’t working,’” Matta joked after the game.
It was the defensive end of the floor where the Buckeyes impressed most, though. Ohio State limited Mercer to just 20 second-half points and the Bears shot just 34 percent from the field on the evening, making 3 for 18 from behind the 3-point line themselves. The Buckeyes also forced Mercer to commit 25 turnovers.
“I think this: If anybody ever says defense can’t win you a game, they don’t know what they’re talking about,” Matta said. “Our defense was definitely the deciding factor tonight just in terms of how active we were.”
Added Lyle: “Three weeks ago, I wouldn’t have made the plays I made on defense tonight and I think that just comes from getting experience and actually playing.”
The worry of that post-Kentucky hangover was there. There was potential to have a setback. There was a brief period of doubt — 20 minutes to be exact — but in the end, Ohio State’s defense didn’t allow that to happen.
“[Mercer] is called the Giant Slayers because they’ve knocked off a lot of high-major schools,” Lyle said. “We didn’t want to be one of them.”
