Bruce Thornton 'wasn't going to let us lose' as Ohio State beats Purdue: 5 takeaways
Bruce Thornton has worn this season like a captain should.
When the Buckeyes danced on the court at Northwest Florida State College to celebrate an Emerald Coast Classic title, Thornton was there to talk. When they lost at reeling Michigan, he was there to face the music. And when interim coach Jake Diebler held his first press conference two days after Chris Holtmann was fired, the sophomore guard followed and took questions about how a season has gone so awry that the coach was let go with six games remaining in the regular season.
He’s had to try and find the answers in the good, the bad and whatever has sat in between. Sunday afternoon, it was only fair that he was seated next to Jamison Battle enjoying one of the more improbable wins in recent memory.
In Diebler’s first game, Thornton scored a team-high 22 points as Ohio State knocked off No. 2 Purdue, 73-69, in front of a crowd of 18,353. It ended with a court-storming, one with Thornton in the thick of it being embraced by hugging Ohio State fans.
The style of play was a little different, even if Purdue coach Matt Painter disagreed with that notion. But as much (or little) as Diebler might have been able to change schematically in three days’ time, he pointed to one key separator for the Buckeyes in this game.
“I thought Bruce had some huge buckets for us in the second half,” Diebler said. “I felt like he was not going to let us lose. That’s what you want in a point guard.”
Refusing to lose seems a novel idea for a team that had lost nine of 11 games to fall to 14-11 overall and 4-10 in the Big Ten, especially going against a Purdue team that had won nine straight to build its record to 23-2 overall and 12-2 in the league. Yet Diebler’s words were as accurate a summary of why Ohio State was able to be four points better than Purdue on this night as anything else.
The Buckeyes looked different. They played with an edge, and with tempo. Thornton was in the middle of it all.
“This was one of my hardest, weirdest, most dramatic times being a college basketball player this last week,” he said. “It’s not normal that your head coach gets fired in the middle of a week before you play probably the No. 1 seed in March Madness coming up. I told our guys we’re all we’ve got right now.
“Three days out, we won that day. Two days out, we won practice another day. We kept doing that, and leading into the game you saw your teammates with a confidence and swagger about them that it doesn’t matter who we play, we’re going to show how to play Ohio State basketball and we showed it tonight.”
What that means for a two-game road swing remains to be seen. The Buckeyes have tied a school record with 16 consecutive road losses and go to Minnesota on Thursday and Michigan State on Sunday. Both will provide opportunities to prove that this wasn’t just a one-time thing and that the Buckeyes can consistently be the team they’ve shown flashes of becoming this season.
Sunday, though, was a day of celebration for the Buckeyes. Here are four more takeaways from the win.
Zed Key stymies Zach Edey
An argument can be made that Ohio State’s tailspin officially began when Zed Key banged into Zach Edey in the first four minutes of a Jan. 5, 2023 home game. The Buckeyes were 10-3 overall, 2-0 in the Big Ten and fired up to host No. 1 Purdue when Key grimaced in pain and grabbed his left shoulder. To that point, Key had been a consistent low-post presence for a youthful Ohio State team that relied on him to finish on the block.
Key would eventually have season-ending surgery, and he was obviously not the same player as he battled through the injury. He then lost about 30 pounds during the offseason and came in as the backup to sophomore Felix Okpara, but his role in the offense has clearly changed and his effectiveness has dropped.
In his first chance to battle the Boilermakers since the shoulder injury, Key got some revenge. In 21:20 off the bench, the fourth-year center had 9 points, one rebound, one assist and a career-high five steals.
Three of the steals came against Edey, who finished with a season-high and career-high-tying six turnovers. Key also took a charge on Edey and anticipated a post feed for the big man, jumping in front of the pass and stealing it in the paint.
Edey still finished with 22 points and 13 rebounds, but Key’s contributions against him were as impactful as anything in the win.
“We know what he can possibly do,” Thornton said. “He showed it today. We know he can’t B.S. us no more because we know what he really can do, especially against the No. 1 big in the country. I’m really proud of how Zed played. If he keeps playing like, we’re going to be a very good team down the stretch.”
Key had never recorded more than two steals in a game.
“He did a good job of stripping him,” Painter said. “I don’t know if he was exposing it or Zed picked up something like a pitcher tipping something. What happened today hasn’t happened much all year. He does a pretty good job protecting the ball. It was a big part of the game, Zed’s ability to defend.”
Jamison Battle breaks out
In his final interview as coach, Holtmann told The Dispatch after the loss to Wisconsin that the Buckeyes were going to have to find a way to try and get Battle a few more open looks. Against the Badgers, Battle tied a season low with six shot attempts and was 1 for 3 from 3-point range, dropping him to 2 for 11 in his last three games.
For 20 minutes, Diebler fared no better. Limited to 10:32 in the first half, Battle went into the locker room with three fouls, a rebound and one turnover when he stepped out of bounds. He did not attempt a shot.
Then Battle scored 19 second-half points, nine of which came on three 3-pointers in the span of 61 seconds, to help Ohio State build an insurmountable lead.
“It’s just staying present in the moment,” he said. “You pick up three fouls, you sit, it’s all right. Come out in the second half, it’s a new opportunity. It’s just consistently going out there, playing basketball and trying to find the best looks for you and trying to be at your best when your best is required.”
His first one came on a post feed from Evan Mahaffey, who grabbed an offensive rebound from Edey’s vicinity. His second one came on a scramble play after a Purdue miss, with Mahaffey helping track down a long rebound as Edey nearly fell into the Ohio State student section near midcourt.
“The play Evan made, he had the offensive rebound and (the next) one Edey tipped it out and me and Evan both went for it,” Battle said. “That’s Evan. That’s not me. I made the shot, but in the end Evan was the one who was the catalyst for both of those shots.”
Defense largely keeps Purdue at bay
The Boilermakers rank No. 2 nationally in adjusted defensive efficiency according to KenPom.com. Ohio State finished the game holding Purdue to 69 points, the third-lowest scoring output of the year for the Boilermakers. It came out to an adjusted offensive efficiency rating of 110.6 points per 100 possessions, the 10th-highest rating allowed by the Buckeyes this season.
But for Purdue, it was the seventh-lowest offensive output of the year.
“Their attention to detail defensively was big time,” Painter said.
Diebler pointed to the performances of players like Key and Okpara, the latter of whom fouled out without scoring or grabbing around in 16:13 while matching up primarily with Edey, for Ohio State’s overall better defensive effort.
“We tried to front him more than in the past,” Diebler said of defending Edey. “You may look at the stat line, but Felix was really, really important. Him trying and battling, you just keep coming and Zach Edey hopefully felt it a little more wearing him down with the physicality and putting different guys on him.”
Offensively, Ohio State finished with an adjusted offensive efficiency rating of 117.1 – the fourth-highest mark allowed by Purdue this season.
The Buckeyes forced 14 Purdue turnovers and turned them into a 22-5 advantage in points off of turnovers.
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Diebler goes deeper into the bench
Ohio State used 10 players in the loss at Wisconsin, one of whom was only on the court for 1:21. In essence, Holtmann had used an eight-man rotation that occasionally stretched to nine players.
Diebler used 11 players against the Boilermakers. Freshman guard Taison Chatman, a healthy, unused substitute for the last five games, was on the court for 2:57 during the first half and did not record a statistic. Freshman center Austin Parks, who had only seen a 39-second appearance since the win against New Orleans on Nov. 21, was on the court for 1:53 during the first half and scored on his first career shot.
For all but seven seconds of his time on the floor, Parks played in a lineup featuring sophomores Roddy Gayle Jr. and Thornton and fellow freshmen Devin Royal and Scotty Middleton. That lineup outscored Purdue 5-1 from 4:30-2:44 during the first half.
“I don’t know that that was the most well-received lineup in the first half (among the coaches),” Diebler said with a laugh. “I’m not sure in the game I was thinking through that, the age of our guys. We’ve had a great deal of experience this season and you have to learn to lean into that. Certainly the youth of this team has been well-documented, but we believe in the guys in the locker room.”
Diebler said the coaches went into the game hoping to substitute more because players would need breaks from playing so hard.
“One of the things we really wanted to do was get guys to just exhaust themselves on the court,” he said. “We had more guys than I can remember saying, coach, I need one. I thought that was good to see. I thought guys stepped up, even if it was Austin Parks in his limited minutes but had a huge bucket.”
Ohio State's bench outscored its Purdue counterparts 26-4, its widest margin since it outscored Miami 30-11 in that category.
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This article originally appeared on The Columbus Dispatch: 5 takeaways: Ohio State's Bruce Thornton 'wasn't going to let us lose'
