Buckeyes spread work around against Bulldogs’ soft zone
A glance at the stat sheet revealed a conundrum for Ohio State coach Chris Holtmann.
Moments earlier, the Buckeyes had finished off their fifth straight win with a 94-65 blowout against The Citadel on Tuesday night. Every recruited scholarship player saw at least 12 minutes of action for OSU, scored at least three points and had at least one rebound against the Bulldogs’ uptempo, defense-optional style of play.
So when it came time to draw conclusions from the game, Holtmann came to the same one that surely the majority of the 10,752 fans at Value City Arena came to: There really weren’t many to draw.
“Unlike most games we’ve played this year, this was an opportunity to see guys play a little bit,” he said. “That is as important as anything, but I don’t know outside of that how much we can take from a game like this outside of the fact that we handled the ball a little better, which was good.
“Their zone doesn’t really present the kind of size that most effective zones do so I don’t know what you can really take from that, but I do think we’ve got a little bit better feel for how we can attack zones.”
It was a fair assessment of 7:30 tonight Fox Sports Ohio WBNS-FM (97.1)
a game that saw the Buckeyes (10-3) attempt a season-high 74 shots, hand out 27 assists for their highest total since totaling 30 against VMI on Nov. 23, 2011, and play leading scorers Keita BatesDiop and Jae’Sean Tate for just 18 minutes each.
For a second straight game, Ohio State never trailed. Punctuating a 15-0 first-half run for a 35-15 lead was a monstrous, right-handed dunk from Tate as he swooped in from the right wing that got the crowd on its feet — including former OSU guard JaQuan Lyle, now sitting out the season after transferring to New Mexico but back in town for the holidays.
The Bulldogs (5-7) entered the game allowing Division I opponents to score an average of 97.6 points per game, and if not for six missed three-point attempts late by three walk-ons, the Buckeyes would have been the fourth to score at least 100 points against them.
Holtmann’s lone bone to pick was that the Buckeyes allowed a season-high 17 offensive rebounds.
“I think we were just trying to control the tempo and limit our turnovers,” said Andrew Dakich, who had a career-high 10 points and tied a career high with five assists. “Obviously that has been a huge emphasis all year. They had 11 offensive rebounds in the first half, which is never great. You can never do that if you want to win important games, but luckily we were more physical and just bigger.”
At halftime, in his first public comments about his decision to leave, Lyle told The Dispatch that he quit the Buckeyes last spring because there was “no trust” between him and the coaching staff.
“I just felt like it was best that I went somewhere else,” he said. “I didn’t feel like I could be successful both on and off the court here, so it was best for me to start over somewhere fresh and somewhere new.”