The final score doesn’t necessarily suggest it, but a lot of things went right for Ohio State on Thursday.
The Buckeyes won the rebounding battle, 35-24. They outscored the Wildcats by 14 points in the paint. Ohio State finished with double-digit assists for the first time in five games, and actually held the lead for longer than Northwestern. The Buckeyes hit 50% of their shots, took twice as many free throws as their opponent and held the Wildcats under 50% shooting for the game. Ohio State even got a stellar performance from Justice Sueing, whose previous struggles had largely coincided with the Buckeyes’ ongoing slump.
Examine the trends of Ohio State’s last 10 games entering Thursday, and you might have thought any of the aforementioned results would have made the difference in the Buckeyes’ ability to get over the hump.
Instead, Ohio State found new ways to lose as it suffered its 10th defeat in the last 11 games.
“I feel like our team has been able to make strides in a lot of areas that we were struggling with a couple of weeks ago. But still, these tight games when they're a couple possessions away, the team is able to go on that little run that kind of puts them over the edge on us,” Sueing said after the 69-63 loss. “So I think just dealing with those inconsistencies and stuff.”
Even after turning things around in all the departments listed above, the Buckeyes still floundered in a number of other categories, whether they were lingering problems or brand-new ones. Ohio State entered the game as the third-best 3-point shooting team in the Big Ten. It finished Thursday’s contest 1-for-14 from beyond the arc, hitting just 7.1% of its threes on a night when Northwestern shot 12-for-29.
Ohio State hadn’t previously hit fewer than three 3-pointers in any single game this season, and hadn’t shot below 23.1% from behind the line.
Another central theme in the Buckeyes’ loss was the performance of Brice Sensabaugh, who tied his lowest-scoring game of the season with just four points on 1-for-8 shooting. The true freshman led the Buckeyes in scoring for 13 straight games from Dec. 17 to Feb. 2, but has now shot a combined 22.7% from the floor in back-to-back subpar offensive showings.
Sensabaugh wasn’t in the starting lineup in either of the past two games, and the 16 minutes he played Thursday tied the fewest he’s played since November. It’s difficult to discern whether the disruption of his regular rotation is the cause of his struggles or the other way around, but Holtmann didn’t offer much of an explanation after the fact.
“It just was the rotation. … Brice is a freshman. He's being guarded by the best player, guys,” Holtmann said. “Like, this is not an easy thing for a kid. he wasn't guarded always by the best player early in the year. He's being guarded by the best player now. Freshmen have moments, we'll help him the best we can. The young man's fighting hard, give him credit. He's allowed to have an off shooting night, we'll find ways to put him in better positions.”
Turnovers and missed free throws were another killer for the Buckeyes, but neither of those are particularly new issues. Ohio State committed 10 or more turnovers in five of its past 10 games before Thursday, so it came as little surprise that the Buckeyes turned it over 15 times against Northwestern. The Wildcats capitalized, scoring 16 points on Ohio State’s errors for a total that nearly covers the contest's final discrepancy three times over.
Ohio State hit just 14 of its 22 free-throw attempts on the night and 13-of-21 in the second half alone. With momentum trending in their direction in the final three minutes, the Buckeyes could’ve turned a four-point deficit into a one-score game when Sueing stepped to the line with 2:59 remaining.
He missed them both.
The Buckeyes got two more cracks to hit a shot on the same sequence as they came down with an offensive board before a quick Northwestern turnover, but they failed to convert on those, too. The Wildcats ended up sinking a three at the other end which served as the beginning of Ohio State’s demise.
Whatever the problem on a given night, Ohio State's had too many to salvage any semblance of a successful season. The Buckeyes have now dropped five straight games for the second time since the start of January, and perhaps even the NIT is out of reach.
Ohio State just keeps digging the hole deeper amid the most disastrous stretch of Holtmann’s career in Columbus, and at least this season, there doesn’t appear to be a way to get out. Not if the Buckeyes keep finding new avenues by which to lose winnable games against Big Ten opposition.
“Getting this feeling game after game after game, it's human nature you're gonna get frustrated,” Bruce Thornton said. “You're gonna get like, 'I'm tired of this' to a point. But until we figure out how to do the small things, nothing's gonna get past us.”
