With just under three minutes remaining in a tie game, Ohio State redshirt sophomore guard Kam Williams caught the ball on the wing directly in front of his own bench. Williams took a dribble toward the basket, causing an Illinois defender to collapse, then he kicked the ball to teammate Marc Loving, who was standing alone in the corner.
Loving, the Buckeyes’ leading scorer, caught the ball in rhythm, then stepped into an uncontested 3-pointer. The entire Ohio State bench stood up and raised its arms in unison as Loving released the shot, hoping they could will a potential game-changing triple into the basket.
Bang.
Loving's 3-pointer gave the Buckeyes a three-point lead. And after making some free throws down the stretch, Ohio State survived a desperation halfcourt heave by Illinois’ Malcolm Hill to earn a rather difficult 75-73 win over the visiting Illini on Sunday night.
“It was a hard-fought game from the beginning to the end,” Loving said afterward. “Just to see no time on the clock and we had more points than the other team was a good thing for us.”
Had this game taken place three weeks ago, though, it’s hard to say if Loving’s shot goes down and the Buckeyes win this game. That’s not say Ohio State’s junior forward isn’t a capable scorer or player — he’s been one of the team’s best so far this season — but it’s more of an indictment on exactly where the Buckeyes were just a few weeks prior.
Ohio State had stumbled out of the gate to a 2-4 record that included a four-game losing streak. Then, after a pair of wins got the Buckeyes back to .500, they were routed by 20 points on the road by Connecticut. Sitting at 4-5 — the worst start in the storied career of head coach Thad Matta — it looked fans in Columbus might be in for a long season.
But since that loss to the Huskies, things have changed for Ohio State and changed in a hurry. Sunday’s win over the Illini was the sixth-consecutive victory for the Buckeyes — a stretch that includes a win over 10th-ranked Kentucky — and improves them to 10-5 overall and 2-0 in the Big Ten.
Pulling out a win in a tightly-contested game didn't seem realistic for Matta's group earlier this year.
“Give our guys credit, a few weeks ago we probably would have crumbled. But we kept our composure, kept fighting.”– Thad Matta
“Give our guys credit, a few weeks ago we probably would have crumbled,” Matta said. “But we kept our composure, kept fighting.”
Ohio State led Illinois for the majority of Sunday’s game, but a 10-0 Illini run late in the second half capped by a Michael Finke 3-pointer with 4 minutes, 55 seconds to play gave Illinois a 61-59 lead — its first since there was 6:14 to play in the first half.
Loving, though, scored nine points over the final 4:16 of the game and made three big free throws down the stretch to help seal the win for the Buckeyes. The Ohio State junior forward finished with a career-high 27 points to go along with seven rebounds. Loving was just 5-for-8 shooting, but made 14 of 19 at the free-throw line.
Freshman point guard JaQuan Lyle had 14 points (all of which came in the second half), sophomore wing Keita Bates-Diop finished with 11 and Williams added 10 off the bench to pace the Buckeyes.
“It’s just the confidence that my teammates have in me,” Loving said. “They put me in the right position and I’m just able to take advantage of those opportunities.”
As Ohio State continues its season-long rebound from the slow start, games like Sunday’s are critical if this team wants to make a run at an NCAA tournament bid. The Buckeyes can’t lose Big Ten games to teams they are better than.
They probably would have lost this game against the Illini had it happened earlier in the season, but Matta said those experiences are part of what helped lift his team to Sunday’s win.
“We are by no stretch of the imagination where we want to be, but there was some uncertainty and the thing that we had to do was get these guys to believe in each other,” Matta said. “The butt-kicking we took at UConn was a great teaching experience for us just in terms of how they attacked us and we could never kind of fight our way through.”
Ohio State will now hit the road for the first time in Big Ten play when it travels to Northwestern on Wednesday. The last time the Buckeyes played on the road was that 20-point loss at the hands of the Huskies.
Ohio State leaned on previous experiences like that UConn game to help pull out a close win Sunday, though. Perhaps it will lean on this one to help it going forward.
“We stayed together as a team and that was the biggest part,” Lyle said. “I think when they went on that run, we kind of started pointing fingers at each other, but then we huddled and was like, ‘We’ve got to do what we’ve got to do.’ We all stepped up, Marc made a big-time 3 and everybody made plays on the defensive end and we got the ‘W.’”
