E.J. Liddell can do it all for the Buckeyes, but he shouldn’t have to on every night.
Ohio State is 3-1 when its star forward scores at least 20 points this season, but two of those wins required game-winning shots in the final moments for the Buckeyes to come out on top – albeit not by Liddell himself – and the other saw the scarlet and gray struggle to put away a 3-5 Niagara program from the MAAC.
Going into last week, Ohio State desperately needed someone other than Liddell to give it another dimension. The Buckeyes have gotten that and more in the last two games, though.
The Buckeyes knocked off the No. 1 team in the country with a win over Duke before notching a double-digit win over Penn State to open conference, and neither of those wins required Herculean efforts from Liddell – at least, not by his standards.
After averaging 22.5 points per game in the first six games of the season, Liddell put up only 14 points in both of those games. Before last week, Liddell had only scored fewer than 14 points in one game, and that was in a game against Bowling Green in which he played just 20 minutes and scored 13 points as the Buckeyes coasted to a 31-point win. Liddell also attempted his fewest shot attempts of the season in that game (eight), but his next-lowest nights in that category have come in the last two games, as Liddell took 10 shots against the Blue Devils and nine against the Nittany Lions.
Perhaps the two most important wins of the season for the Buckeyes have been on nights when Liddell has gotten significant help from his supporting cast, and those contributions have come from a variety of players, an important development for a team that appears to be surging at the start of December.
“We’ve had guys really make some really clutch plays. Meechie (Johnson), Malaki (Branham), Zed (Key), E.J. on down the line,” Chris Holtmann said on his radio show Monday. “It takes a lot of game experience, trial and error, some disappointing moments that you have to learn and grow from. It’s all a part of this right now, this November-December stretch. How much can this prepare us as we move forward into January and February.”
Let’s not undersell what Liddell did against Duke. The Illinois native pulled down 14 boards to match his point total, dished six assists, blocked three shots and scored four of the final six points for the Buckeyes – including a fadeaway jumper to put Ohio State ahead three points with 15 seconds left – to complete a frenzied second-half comeback against the nation’s top-ranked team. But Liddell was not even the Buckeyes’ scoring leader on the night, and before the aforementioned final stretch, he had scored just two points in the second half.
It was Key that did the most damage on the scoreboard against Duke, setting a new career-high with a 20-point effort in which the sophomore big man poured in 11 points in the second half alone. In a span of less than three minutes down to the 4:51 mark, Key scored seven out of nine points for Ohio State in a stretch that cut a double-digit Bue Devil lead down to six points.
Then it was Louisiana transfer Cedric Russell making big plays for the Buckeyes late, scoring six of the final 10 points for Ohio State during its 12-0 run to close out the game. The fifth-year shooting guard drew a charge that fouled out Duke phenom Paolo Banchero on defense. Russell finished with a season-high 12 points, four times as many as he’d scored as a Buckeye entering the night, to give Ohio State a third scorer in double digits against Duke.
“Ced, I think in a lot of ways – Ced and Zed – were the difference,” Holtmann said after the game. “We need some production on the perimeter, but Cedric had a look in his eyes, he wanted to stay aggressive. … I thought Ced’s ability to step up and that dagger three that he hit there in the corner, it wasn’t quite a dagger, but it was really important for us.”
On Sunday at Penn State, it was neither Key nor Russell that made the difference for the Buckeyes. This time it was Jamari Wheeler, returning to his former home gym as an opponent for the first time, and Kyle Young, who scored a season-high 16 points with the help of a 4-for-4 shooting performance from 3-point range. Wheeler assisted the fifth-year forward on three of those four attempts, as the former Nittany Lion point guard finished with a season-high nine assists to match his nine-point scoring total.
“When you have a guy like Kyle Young, the luxury you have in him coming off the bench to play like he did last night, it allows you to (play depth),” Holtmann said.
Young led the way, but the entire Buckeye bench outscored Penn State’s 29-5 in one of the most crucial stats of the night in Ohio State’s win.
Freshman guard Malaki Branham quietly put forth the best offensive effort of his young Ohio State career as well, finishing with 11 points on 5-for-9 shooting in 27 minutes, including a pair of baskets through the middle of the second half that broke up an 18-7 run in which Penn State got back into the game.
That stretch allowed the Nittany Lions to go from down 18 to just seven with less than four minutes remaining in Sunday’s game, but again the Buckeye supporting cast answered the call with a pair of 3-pointers from two other players. Freshman guard Meechie Johnson Jr. extended the Ohio State back up to 10 points on a triple with 3:53 to play, and when Penn State got the deficit back down to eight, Justin Ahrens hit a three of his own to increase the lead to 11 with 2:15 to go.
Johnson and Ahrens combined to score 17 points on the night as they both topped their season scoring average and made a difference for the Buckeyes in crunch time.
By the final minute, it was Liddell making big plays for Ohio State once again. Liddell slammed home a two-handed dunk to make it a 72-64 game with 41 seconds to play to keep it a three-possession game, and he knocked down a pair of free throws with 13 seconds left to score the final points of the night in a 12-point win.
Liddell didn’t hit a shot from the floor until just 1:14 remained in the first half, and he got in foul trouble in the second half when he picked up his third and fourth on the same Penn State possession with 5:53 to play. Luckily for the Buckeyes, they got more than enough from the rest of their roster to sustain the lead.
Even without injured veterans Justice Sueing and Seth Towns, not to mention a young wing in Eugene Brown who is still working his way back into the rotation after returning from a concussion, the Buckeye roster is deep and versatile. It just needs tangible contributions from more than one of those sources on any given night to truly be successful, and right now, Ohio State is getting them from its supporting cast.
“We’ve got enough depth where we can play our best players between 25-31 minutes, because we have enough depth to do that,” Holtmann said. “I’ve got to continue to grow our bench, but you’re really mindful of it, especially in this stretch right now, not to overtax your guys.”
