Connor Lemons
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The Autopsy: Five areas where Ohio State men’s basketball fell short
Connor Lemons via our friends at Land-Grant Holy Land
Visit their fantastic blog and read the full article (and so much more) here
Joseph Maiorana-Imagn Images
Diving into what actually held Ohio State back this season.
The Ohio State men’s basketball season ended one month ago with a loss to Iowa in the opening round of the Big Ten Tournament, finishing with a final record of 17-15.
The Buckeyes missed the NCAA Tournament for the third consecutive season – the first time that’s happened since they missed the 2003-2005 NCAA Tournaments. It was a painful finish to a disappointing season that began with a ton of enthusiasm and momentum after a fun, exciting finish season to the 2023-2024 season that ultimately ended with Ohio State making a run to the third run of the NIT.
Jake Diebler parlayed his impressive showing as interim head coach into the full-time head coaching job, and by late January, it looked like Ohio State was going to return to the NCAA Tournament. A 19-point road win over Penn State at historic Rec Hall put the Buckeyes at 13-8 overall and 5-5 in Big Ten play.
Things went south from there, however, as the Buckeyes won 4 of their final 11 games and missed the big dance yet again.
It’s been one month since the season ended, and I’ve had some time to look back on the year with a wider lens. It seems most fans are pinning the lost season on Diebler alone, and yes, the buck stops with the head coach. When you put together the roster, you shoulder the blame for its faults.
But if you’re interested in a more technical assessment of why this Ohio State team fell short, here are (in my opinion) the five reasons why the 126th version of Buckeye basketball did not meet expectations.
Listen, if you’re trying to put together an IKEA dresser, but your toolbox is filled with nothing but plastic spoons, you’re going to have a hard time putting the dresser together. Even if you understand the instructions and have all the motivation in the world to put that dresser together, only having plastic spoons is going to make that job much more difficult.
In a similar sense, Jake Diebler’s biggest fault from this past season wasn’t something that he did or did not do on the basketball court – it was how he evaluated the transfer portal last April when he was building his first team. Once the roster was set in July, the tools he had to work with were finalized, and it was his job to win with them.
Perhaps it was because he didn’t have a coaching staff yet – Diebler was hired on March 17, 2024 – one day before the transfer portal window opened. He didn’t have much help, so he acted fast in adding Aaron Bradshaw, Sean Stewart, and Meechie Johnson to the roster.
Unfortunately, Diebler’s evaluation of the players he added in the portal last spring was probably his undoing. Bradshaw and Johnson combined to miss 32 games – Johnson missed 22 games for mental health-related matters, and Bradshaw missed 10 games combined between illness, injury, and a university investigation.
Those two combined to score 223 points in 32 games last season – an average of 6.9 points per game.
/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/25948539/usa_today_25402271.jpg "NCAA Basketball: Washington at Ohio State")
Joseph Maiorana-Imagn Images
Now, there was no way for Diebler to foresee Bradshaw missing several games due to a university investigation of which the results were not made public. Nor could he have predicted Johnson, who played a combined 63 games at South Carolina from 2022-2024, to play 10 games and then step away from the program.
However, the basketball side of it? That could’ve been better. Bradshaw started the season as Ohio State’s starting center, but at 7-foot-1, 215 pounds was dominated by Big Ten as well as mid-major centers. He averaged just 2.7 rebounds per game and had no post moves or presence to provide. The incorrect assessment that Bradshaw’s athleticism would make up for his slim frame was a critical mistake, and it hurt Ohio State in a major way.
Stewart, unlike Bradshaw, provided stability at times in the Ohio State frontcourt, but was not on the floor consistently enough be the type of difference-maker that the team needed him to be. He was third in the nation last year in fouls per 40 minutes, averaging a whopping 7.5 per 40 minutes and one foul every 5.4 minutes he was on the floor.
The 6-foot-9, 220-pounder was a good cutter, high-flyer, and found himself in position to score easy baskets when he was on the floor, but had poor touch around the basket and was an even worse free throw shooter. Nearly all of Stewart’s shots came right below the basket, yet he only shot 54.2% from the floor. He was also a 50% free throw shooter, which made him a liability in late-game situations.
His 27.1% defensive rebounding rate was 14th-best in the nation, showing that if he can stay out of foul trouble, Stewart should be able to coast to 10 rebounds per game in the future. Since he only played 18 minutes per game last year, that talent wasn’t as noticeable to people as his offensive struggles.
The bottom line with the transfers – Ohio State had all of their eggs in Stewart, Bradshaw, and Johnson’s baskets last season. Diebler had no choice but to lean on those players in a big way, and they were not able to provide the production Ohio State absolutely needed to get from its (expected) starting shooting guard, power forward, and center.
A quick summary of Ohio State’s rebounding woes last season:
It’s easy to look at Ohio State’s lineup and assume that the reason they were so often dominated on the glass is because of Bradshaw and Stewart, and that is partially true. Bradshaw, despite being 7-foot-1, was not strong enough to rebound in the Big Ten. Because of that, Stewart was often forced to play out of position at center, where he was usually giving up an inch or two and 20-30 pounds on opposing centers. That did not help.
But as a team, Ohio State did not rebound. The Buckeyes’ loss to Indiana on March 8 sticks out as a good example. The Hoosiers had five different players – including guards Anthony Leal and Luke Goode – grab five or more rebounds. In a six-point loss, Ohio State was out-rebounded 40-31 overall, 14-8 on the offensive glass, and gave up 18 second-chance points.
It wasn’t just Oumar Ballo that tormented Ohio State that game – it was all of Indiana’s roster. Up and down the lineup, Hoosiers were getting the best of Ohio State on the glass. To me, that’s not just a size problem — that’s a team-wide, rebounding philosophy issue. How is it that IU had five different players grab multiple offensive rebounds? How did Indiana want the ball so much more than Ohio State?
“We’ve got some guys who are a little too reliant on their athleticism in rebounding and not reliant enough on our physicality,” Diebler said after the game. “Our effort is not the issue. Our awareness at times, we get caught staring. Instead of going to create more space for us to rebound by initiating contact further out on the floor, we wait too much for guys to hit us.”
So yes, Ohio State being the 95th-smallest team in the country last year hurt it, but in my eyes, it was a team-wide mentality (or lack thereof) that plagued them on the glass all year long. That must change.
/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/25948540/usa_today_25583540.jpg "Syndication: The Columbus Dispatch")
Adam Cairns/Columbus Dispatch / USA TODAY NETWORK via Imagn Images
It’d be easy to pin Ohio State’s fouling issues solely on Sean Stewart, but that’s not just a lazy assessment, it would also be unfair to him. Yes, Stewart did foul at an impressively high rate, but Ohio State ‘s 19.6 team fouls per game not only led the Big Ten this season, but it was also the highest per-game average for any Big Ten team since the 2020-2021 Michigan State Spartans, which averaged 19.8 per game.
The Buckeyes also had the critically unfortunate combination of fouling far too often and fouling players who shot free throws well. Ohio State was 13th nationally in fouls per game and were also 39th in the country in opponent free throw percentage – their opponents were 75.2% from the stripe, the second-best mark in the Big Ten. Pair that with opponents taking 23.1 free throws per game against Ohio State (33rd-most in the country and most in the Big Ten), and you get a lot of free points.
All of that equated to Ohio State opponents scoring a whopping 23.6% of their points from the free throw line last season – the 13th-highest mark in the nation and by far the highest mark in the Big Ten conference.
It just comes down to playing smart – too many fouls late in possessions when the shot clock was nearing zero, and too many fouls on plays where opponents were probably going to score anyway.
If it felt like the ball “stuck” with one player too often, that’s because it’s true. On far too many possessions, the ball would get to one player, the shot clock would hit 10 or 11 seconds, and that player would end up having to take the shot at the end of the shot clock.
Diebler has a lot of confidence in his guys to “go make a play” which at times can be a blessing as well as a hindrance. Bruce Thornton, John Mobley, and Micah Parrish were all capable of taking on a defender in isolation and scoring, but there are times when – even if you hit that tough, isolation shot – that it was not the best possible shot you could’ve gotten.
It’s not just on the ball handler, either. When those possessions broke down, there was a clear lack of movement away from the ball – four players on the perimeter, one inside, and everyone watching the ball instead of moving to create space. That led to over-dribbling and bad shots.
On the season, Ohio State was 16th in the Big Ten with 13.2 assists per game, ahead of just Rutgers and Washington. That equated to a 47.9% assist rate, which was 282nd nationally and 17th in the Big Ten.
The Buckeyes still ended the season with a 1.209 assist-to-turnover ratio, which was 139th in the country and better than the median ratio of 1.127. That’s largely as a credit to how rarely Ohio State turned the ball over this year, headlined by Thornton’s 3-1 assist-to-turnover ratio at point guard.
/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/25881326/usa_today_25466490.jpg "NCAA Basketball: Northwestern at Ohio State")
Joseph Maiorana-Imagn Images
After a 24-point home win over Washington on February 12, Ohio State found itself sitting at 15-10 overall, and 7-7 in the Big Ten, with three home games and three road games remaining. Two of those home games – Northwestern and Nebraska – were games in which Ohio State was favored. Win those two games, and just one of Michigan, USC, UCLA, and Indiana, and Ohio State could’ve stamped their ticket to the NCAA Tournament.
With March Madness firmly within their grasp, Ohio State came out and laid the eggiest egg that has ever been egged against Northwestern eight days later by a final score of 70-49. The Wildcats were without two of its three leading scorers (Brooks Barnhizer and Jalen Leach) who to that point in the season had combined to average 31.4 points per game.
Northwestern took a seven-point lead into halftime, and then came out of the locker room and started the second half on a 17-2 run, taking a 48-26 lead early in the second half. Ohio State never showed any fight in that game, getting kicked to the curb by a Big Ten team that was – at the time – 4-11 in Big Ten play and not even thinking about the NCAA Tournament.
That theme repeated itself in Ohio State’s season-ending loss to Iowa in the Big Ten Tournament. The Hawkeyes – which needed a win over Nebraska on the final day of the season just to get into the Big Ten Tournament – had nothing to play for and had a coach that was going to be fired the moment their season ended.
The Buckeyes made Iowa AD Beth Goetz wait one extra day before she could fire Fran McCaffery, as a late 9-2 run in the closing minutes helped Iowa – the first ever 15-seed in the Big Ten Tournament – knock off Ohio State, 77-70.
In both games, it looked like Ohio State was unaware of what was at stake against teams who had far less to play for. If either of those games flipped, Ohio State may have found themselves in Dayton for the NCAA First Four. Somehow, the light never turned on. Somehow, Ohio State forgot to play up to the significance of the moment.
Collectively, we waited for Ohio State to snap out of it, stop toying with their food, and win a game that they needed to win. It never happened.
Continue reading...
Connor Lemons via our friends at Land-Grant Holy Land
Visit their fantastic blog and read the full article (and so much more) here
Joseph Maiorana-Imagn Images
Diving into what actually held Ohio State back this season.
The Ohio State men’s basketball season ended one month ago with a loss to Iowa in the opening round of the Big Ten Tournament, finishing with a final record of 17-15.
The Buckeyes missed the NCAA Tournament for the third consecutive season – the first time that’s happened since they missed the 2003-2005 NCAA Tournaments. It was a painful finish to a disappointing season that began with a ton of enthusiasm and momentum after a fun, exciting finish season to the 2023-2024 season that ultimately ended with Ohio State making a run to the third run of the NIT.
Jake Diebler parlayed his impressive showing as interim head coach into the full-time head coaching job, and by late January, it looked like Ohio State was going to return to the NCAA Tournament. A 19-point road win over Penn State at historic Rec Hall put the Buckeyes at 13-8 overall and 5-5 in Big Ten play.
Things went south from there, however, as the Buckeyes won 4 of their final 11 games and missed the big dance yet again.
It’s been one month since the season ended, and I’ve had some time to look back on the year with a wider lens. It seems most fans are pinning the lost season on Diebler alone, and yes, the buck stops with the head coach. When you put together the roster, you shoulder the blame for its faults.
But if you’re interested in a more technical assessment of why this Ohio State team fell short, here are (in my opinion) the five reasons why the 126th version of Buckeye basketball did not meet expectations.
No. 1 - Poor evaluation of the transfer portal
Listen, if you’re trying to put together an IKEA dresser, but your toolbox is filled with nothing but plastic spoons, you’re going to have a hard time putting the dresser together. Even if you understand the instructions and have all the motivation in the world to put that dresser together, only having plastic spoons is going to make that job much more difficult.
In a similar sense, Jake Diebler’s biggest fault from this past season wasn’t something that he did or did not do on the basketball court – it was how he evaluated the transfer portal last April when he was building his first team. Once the roster was set in July, the tools he had to work with were finalized, and it was his job to win with them.
Perhaps it was because he didn’t have a coaching staff yet – Diebler was hired on March 17, 2024 – one day before the transfer portal window opened. He didn’t have much help, so he acted fast in adding Aaron Bradshaw, Sean Stewart, and Meechie Johnson to the roster.
Unfortunately, Diebler’s evaluation of the players he added in the portal last spring was probably his undoing. Bradshaw and Johnson combined to miss 32 games – Johnson missed 22 games for mental health-related matters, and Bradshaw missed 10 games combined between illness, injury, and a university investigation.
Those two combined to score 223 points in 32 games last season – an average of 6.9 points per game.
Now, there was no way for Diebler to foresee Bradshaw missing several games due to a university investigation of which the results were not made public. Nor could he have predicted Johnson, who played a combined 63 games at South Carolina from 2022-2024, to play 10 games and then step away from the program.
However, the basketball side of it? That could’ve been better. Bradshaw started the season as Ohio State’s starting center, but at 7-foot-1, 215 pounds was dominated by Big Ten as well as mid-major centers. He averaged just 2.7 rebounds per game and had no post moves or presence to provide. The incorrect assessment that Bradshaw’s athleticism would make up for his slim frame was a critical mistake, and it hurt Ohio State in a major way.
Stewart, unlike Bradshaw, provided stability at times in the Ohio State frontcourt, but was not on the floor consistently enough be the type of difference-maker that the team needed him to be. He was third in the nation last year in fouls per 40 minutes, averaging a whopping 7.5 per 40 minutes and one foul every 5.4 minutes he was on the floor.
The 6-foot-9, 220-pounder was a good cutter, high-flyer, and found himself in position to score easy baskets when he was on the floor, but had poor touch around the basket and was an even worse free throw shooter. Nearly all of Stewart’s shots came right below the basket, yet he only shot 54.2% from the floor. He was also a 50% free throw shooter, which made him a liability in late-game situations.
His 27.1% defensive rebounding rate was 14th-best in the nation, showing that if he can stay out of foul trouble, Stewart should be able to coast to 10 rebounds per game in the future. Since he only played 18 minutes per game last year, that talent wasn’t as noticeable to people as his offensive struggles.
The bottom line with the transfers – Ohio State had all of their eggs in Stewart, Bradshaw, and Johnson’s baskets last season. Diebler had no choice but to lean on those players in a big way, and they were not able to provide the production Ohio State absolutely needed to get from its (expected) starting shooting guard, power forward, and center.
No. 2 – They were a very bad rebounding team
A quick summary of Ohio State’s rebounding woes last season:
- 13th in the Big Ten in rebounds per game (33.7)
- 13th in the Big Ten in offensive rebounds per game (9.5)
- 10th in the Big Ten in defensive rebounds per game (24.1)
- 15th in the Big Ten in opponent offensive rebounds per game (10.6)
- 12th in the Big Ten in opponent rebounds per game (34)
It’s easy to look at Ohio State’s lineup and assume that the reason they were so often dominated on the glass is because of Bradshaw and Stewart, and that is partially true. Bradshaw, despite being 7-foot-1, was not strong enough to rebound in the Big Ten. Because of that, Stewart was often forced to play out of position at center, where he was usually giving up an inch or two and 20-30 pounds on opposing centers. That did not help.
But as a team, Ohio State did not rebound. The Buckeyes’ loss to Indiana on March 8 sticks out as a good example. The Hoosiers had five different players – including guards Anthony Leal and Luke Goode – grab five or more rebounds. In a six-point loss, Ohio State was out-rebounded 40-31 overall, 14-8 on the offensive glass, and gave up 18 second-chance points.
It wasn’t just Oumar Ballo that tormented Ohio State that game – it was all of Indiana’s roster. Up and down the lineup, Hoosiers were getting the best of Ohio State on the glass. To me, that’s not just a size problem — that’s a team-wide, rebounding philosophy issue. How is it that IU had five different players grab multiple offensive rebounds? How did Indiana want the ball so much more than Ohio State?
“We’ve got some guys who are a little too reliant on their athleticism in rebounding and not reliant enough on our physicality,” Diebler said after the game. “Our effort is not the issue. Our awareness at times, we get caught staring. Instead of going to create more space for us to rebound by initiating contact further out on the floor, we wait too much for guys to hit us.”
So yes, Ohio State being the 95th-smallest team in the country last year hurt it, but in my eyes, it was a team-wide mentality (or lack thereof) that plagued them on the glass all year long. That must change.
No. 3 -Ohio State fouled at a near-historic rate
It’d be easy to pin Ohio State’s fouling issues solely on Sean Stewart, but that’s not just a lazy assessment, it would also be unfair to him. Yes, Stewart did foul at an impressively high rate, but Ohio State ‘s 19.6 team fouls per game not only led the Big Ten this season, but it was also the highest per-game average for any Big Ten team since the 2020-2021 Michigan State Spartans, which averaged 19.8 per game.
The Buckeyes also had the critically unfortunate combination of fouling far too often and fouling players who shot free throws well. Ohio State was 13th nationally in fouls per game and were also 39th in the country in opponent free throw percentage – their opponents were 75.2% from the stripe, the second-best mark in the Big Ten. Pair that with opponents taking 23.1 free throws per game against Ohio State (33rd-most in the country and most in the Big Ten), and you get a lot of free points.
All of that equated to Ohio State opponents scoring a whopping 23.6% of their points from the free throw line last season – the 13th-highest mark in the nation and by far the highest mark in the Big Ten conference.
It just comes down to playing smart – too many fouls late in possessions when the shot clock was nearing zero, and too many fouls on plays where opponents were probably going to score anyway.
No. 4 - They did not share the ball well enough
If it felt like the ball “stuck” with one player too often, that’s because it’s true. On far too many possessions, the ball would get to one player, the shot clock would hit 10 or 11 seconds, and that player would end up having to take the shot at the end of the shot clock.
Diebler has a lot of confidence in his guys to “go make a play” which at times can be a blessing as well as a hindrance. Bruce Thornton, John Mobley, and Micah Parrish were all capable of taking on a defender in isolation and scoring, but there are times when – even if you hit that tough, isolation shot – that it was not the best possible shot you could’ve gotten.
It’s not just on the ball handler, either. When those possessions broke down, there was a clear lack of movement away from the ball – four players on the perimeter, one inside, and everyone watching the ball instead of moving to create space. That led to over-dribbling and bad shots.
On the season, Ohio State was 16th in the Big Ten with 13.2 assists per game, ahead of just Rutgers and Washington. That equated to a 47.9% assist rate, which was 282nd nationally and 17th in the Big Ten.
The Buckeyes still ended the season with a 1.209 assist-to-turnover ratio, which was 139th in the country and better than the median ratio of 1.127. That’s largely as a credit to how rarely Ohio State turned the ball over this year, headlined by Thornton’s 3-1 assist-to-turnover ratio at point guard.
No. 5 - Lack of urgency
After a 24-point home win over Washington on February 12, Ohio State found itself sitting at 15-10 overall, and 7-7 in the Big Ten, with three home games and three road games remaining. Two of those home games – Northwestern and Nebraska – were games in which Ohio State was favored. Win those two games, and just one of Michigan, USC, UCLA, and Indiana, and Ohio State could’ve stamped their ticket to the NCAA Tournament.
With March Madness firmly within their grasp, Ohio State came out and laid the eggiest egg that has ever been egged against Northwestern eight days later by a final score of 70-49. The Wildcats were without two of its three leading scorers (Brooks Barnhizer and Jalen Leach) who to that point in the season had combined to average 31.4 points per game.
Northwestern took a seven-point lead into halftime, and then came out of the locker room and started the second half on a 17-2 run, taking a 48-26 lead early in the second half. Ohio State never showed any fight in that game, getting kicked to the curb by a Big Ten team that was – at the time – 4-11 in Big Ten play and not even thinking about the NCAA Tournament.
That theme repeated itself in Ohio State’s season-ending loss to Iowa in the Big Ten Tournament. The Hawkeyes – which needed a win over Nebraska on the final day of the season just to get into the Big Ten Tournament – had nothing to play for and had a coach that was going to be fired the moment their season ended.
The Buckeyes made Iowa AD Beth Goetz wait one extra day before she could fire Fran McCaffery, as a late 9-2 run in the closing minutes helped Iowa – the first ever 15-seed in the Big Ten Tournament – knock off Ohio State, 77-70.
In both games, it looked like Ohio State was unaware of what was at stake against teams who had far less to play for. If either of those games flipped, Ohio State may have found themselves in Dayton for the NCAA First Four. Somehow, the light never turned on. Somehow, Ohio State forgot to play up to the significance of the moment.
Collectively, we waited for Ohio State to snap out of it, stop toying with their food, and win a game that they needed to win. It never happened.
Continue reading...