How different can Ohio State look with Jake Diebler now in charge as interim coach?
To Bruce Thornton, it felt like stepping into the not-too-distant past.
On Thursday afternoon, the sophomore and team captain took the floor for the first practice of a new era of Ohio State men’s basketball. As the Buckeyes began their preparations for Sunday’s game with No. 2 Purdue, they had a new voice barking out directions and running the show. Interim head coach Jake Diebler was in charge, one day removed from being elevated to the job after Chris Holtmann was fired amid his seventh year with the program.
Diebler has been on staff for the last four years. Realistically, the move from Holtmann to Diebler can only change so much at this point in the season, but Thornton said he picked up on one significant difference pretty quickly.
“It reminded me of how fast in high school I used to play,” Thornton said Friday. “It was great pace and great energy. That’s how you get your conditioning up. That pace and energy that Dieb (Diebler) brings, the team kind of needed that right now.”
In announcing Holtmann’s dismissal, athletic director Gene Smith said the timing of the move was to give Diebler as long a runway as possible to help Ohio State achieve its best results in the games remaining. Having lost nine of their last 11 games, the Buckeyes are 14-11 overall, 4-10 in league play and have six games to play before entering the Big Ten Tournament.
In mid-February, Diebler said he told the team there’s no magic cure-all he can provide to instantaneously turn the season around.
“What I told them was with six games left, it’s hard to make these wholesale changes,” he said. “But the way thing I could do for them is to be me and not try to be Holt or be someone else, but I needed to be the best version of me. We changed some things in practice, not necessarily drills but the format a little bit to fit my personality.”
That meant more tempo, not just in drills but in between them as well. Water breaks were shorter. Down time was at a premium, and players who dawdled too long had extra sprints to run. For a team ranked 308th nationally in adjusted tempo according to KenPom.com, Ohio State’s worst ranking since the website started in 1996-97, it’s a signal that the Buckeyes might actually try to push the pace a little bit more.
If Ohio State is able, that could help give a boost to a unit ranked No. 45 nationally in adjusted offensive efficiency that often gets stuck in the mud with too much dribbling and not enough ball movement.
“He was trying to bring the pace, get more transition buckets, things like that to increase our tempo and our urgency on the court that we need to have to finish out the year like we wanted,” Thornton said. “It can be a great role for us, trying to have a different style of pace about us to win big games in the future.”
Diebler pointed to another area where he’s preaching greater accountability. Ohio State is seventh in Big Ten games in offensive rebounding, grabbing 34.6 total boards per game, and sixth in defensive rebounding, allowing 34.5 per game.
Rebounding was something Holtmann consistently cited as an area of concern for this team. Now it’s an area Diebler is also harping on, especially with Purdue coming to town. The Boilermakers grab more (42.1 per game) and allow the least (29.9) of any team in Big Ten play, in large part to large (7-4) center Zach Edey.
“We talked (Thursday) as a program with our guys and we just said this is an area we feel like we can control to a better degree,” Diebler said. “I point-blank asked them: this is an area I want to hold you more accountable. I need you to accept that and embrace that and we all agreed it’s an area that we can be better.”
Like everything else, the question is how much better can the Buckeyes get. At his press conference to announce the firing, Smith repeatedly stressed that he believes in the talent level on the roster and that it was not being fully realized. That would indicate there is a level Ohio State has not been able to consistently tap into this year and one that, perhaps, Diebler can help the players find.
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Then again, maybe the Buckeyes are what they are: a team that went 16-19 last season that is 30-30 overall during the last two seasons and 9-25 in the Big Ten. If that’s the case, maybe Diebler’s biggest impact won’t be on how the Buckeyes look but the manner with which they play.
“I’m not going to sit here and pretend I have some kind of secret formula that’s all of a sudden going to make all the difference in the world, but I do know that I care and I love these guys and this staff,” he said. “I care about this program. I care about serving this program well.
“We’ve had great moments in league play. That gives me belief we’ve got more we can be and be better consistently. I know the heart of our guys and the fight that they have.”
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This article originally appeared on The Columbus Dispatch: How will Ohio State basketball look vs. Purdue with Jake Diebler as coach?
