Ohio State’s limitless ceiling and early inconsistencies
“This was a really good opportunity to show we’re a tough team. Any doubters, we’re gonna fight and compete against anyone: number two, number a hundred,” — Dorka Juhasz, Ohio State’s leading scorer and rebounder, proclaimed after beating the Louisville Cardinals.
And the Buckeyes have competed. Ohio State currently has a record of 6–3 against what has been one of the toughest schedules in the country. Eight of the team’s nine opponents have a winning record, five are in the top 100 in RPI, and two are ranked top-10 in the latest AP Poll. Their schedule doesn’t get easier anytime soon as the Buckeyes travel to California to face the No. 1 ranked Stanford Cardinal this Sunday.
Through this gauntlet of a schedule, Ohio State has proven that they can compete with anybody. The Buckeyes defeated the No. 7 ranked Louisville Cardinals, dominated a possibly tournament-bound UNI team, and even in their loss to UConn, were a few open jump shots away from pulling the upset.
But while capable of beating the best in the country, they’re also prone to floundering against lesser competition. They lost to the Ohio Bobcats at home, a team currently ranked outside the top 100 in RPI. South Dakota handily defeated them 68–53 on a neutral court. Even their most recent victory against 2–5 Radford wasn’t decided until the final minutes of the fourth quarter.
They’re perhaps the most Jekyll and Hyde team in college basketball. One night, they look like one of the best teams in the country. The next, they look like an NIT team. Nine games into the season, the Buckeyes are still looking to find consistency.
Youth and inexperience
Driving Ohio State’s variance is their youth and inexperience. The Buckeyes run a 10-player rotation consisting of one junior, three sophomores, and six freshmen. The team’s elder statesman, Braxtin Miller, is a transfer student. No one receiving playing time has more than a year of experience with the program.
Without upperclassman leadership, head coach Kevin McGuff has leaned on his second-year players, asking them to take on responsibilities above and beyond the typical second-year player. “Janai [Crooms], Dorka [Juhasz], and Aaliyah [Patty] are only sophomores but they played a lot of minutes last year,” McGuff said. “I kind of look at them as leaders as well, and they can’t really be sophomores. They have to be more like juniors or seniors.”
In theory, that sounds great. But actual experience isn’t something that can be hand-waved or artificially granted to the best options available. At the end of the day, Crooms, Juhasz, and Patty are still sophomores, no matter what Ohio State needs them to be. The Buckeyes will need to succeed this season without experience. They’ll need to rely on their young players.
Finding an identity
Another result of Ohio State’s numerous fresh faces is a team that is still searching for its identity. Depending on the night and the opponent, Ohio State might hammer the ball down low, play five-out, or even press full court. They’re still testing the waters on what this roster is capable of and still deciding what their optimal playing style is.
In the preseason, McGuff noted how they wanted to play a five-out style based on modern pace-and-space basketball. “We have the opportunity with our post players being able to play away from the basket,” he said. “We don’t want to get totally away when they never get around the basket. But I think it would allow us to use your speed and quickness to create lanes to the basket without having a post player to kind of clog those up.”
But the Buckeyes haven’t played on the perimeter as much as originally expected. They’re shooting 31% from behind the arc so far this season, a respectable but relatively average figure.
Instead, isolating opponents in the post has been their most common and successful strategy so far this season. They play two bigs most of the time, allowing them to work through high-low sets and attack the weaker matchup down low. Juhasz, the Buckeyes’ primary post weapon, leads the team in scoring. Her backup, Rebeka Mikulasikova, ranks third. Both players are averaging more than one point per shot attempt, ranking them in the top third of the NCAA in terms of efficiency. Ohio State has a 2-point field goal percentage of 53%, ranking 16th among 351 teams.
The press has been something just shy of an unmitigated disaster. The only time the Buckeyes pressed for an entire game was against South Dakota. That was also their only double-digit loss of the year. They attempted to press Radford at the beginning of their most recent contest. It worked so poorly they scrapped it completely at halftime. Ohio State has tried zone and man press, applying all different types of full-court pressure to hinder opponents.
With a rotation that runs 10-deep and a bevy of young, athletic guards who can press into opponents, their personnel checks all the boxes of a team that should be able to get after ballhandlers for 94 feet. But if they want their full-court press to be effective, they’ll probably need to commit to it full time. So far, the Buckeyes have been unwilling to do that.
Ohio State has also already experimented with numerous lineup combinations. They’ll play big at times, play small at others, and they’ve already started four different lineups just nine games into the season. Their closing lineup is even harder to pin down. Against Louisville, the Buckeyes substituted several times in the last few minutes to match different looks the Cardinals threw at them. McGuff isn’t afraid to change his final five based on matchup or in-game performance.
This early into the season, as well as, these young freshmen’s careers, it makes sense to refrain from committing to anything definitive just yet. The Buckeyes should explore their options and feel confident about their most effective path before deciding on any overarching philosophies.
Eventually, they’ll need to decide who they are as a team. They can dabble in different looks and alter their gameplan based on opponent, but they can’t continue to waffle back-and-forth without establishing an identity. A team who is a jack of all trades and master of none won’t make it where the Buckeyes want to go. And with the talent on the roster, they have the ability to go incredibly far.
Talent and improvement
There are plenty of young teams throughout the country. What makes Ohio State unique is its combination of youth and talent. Miller has been named honorable mention All-Big 12 twice. Juhasz was named second-team All-Big Ten last season. The freshman class, which holds six of the Buckeyes’ ten rotation spots, was the fourth-ranked class in the nation. Ohio State has more individual talent than just about anyone they’ll face.
Which is why the Buckeyes’ success won’t be defined by their talent, but rather their improvement as a team. According to McGuff, Ohio State has already made significant strides this season, although they have a long way to go. “We’re getting better. We had a closed scrimmage, which obviously none of you guys saw. I told them in the locker room where we are then, and where we are now, we’ve made a lot of progress,” he said. “In one month from now, we need to be significantly farther along than where we are right now.”
McGuff never appears distraught after a loss or ecstatic after a victory. Even after the team’s biggest win of the season, he talked about what they could improve upon: “If this is the pinnacle of the season, then we didn’t have the season that we’re capable of having. We have a long way to go and we can get better in pretty much all phases of the game.”
That even-keeled attitude has been essential during Ohio State’s early peaks and valleys. The Buckeyes are a young team who has the personnel. Now, they just need to put it together. “You can see the talent on the young players on our team,” McGuff said. “Now, we just gotta get them just continuing to get better and probably as much as anything just have them playing consistently.”
Whether the Buckeyes can find that consistency will determine the future of their season.
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