Northwestern’s near-triumph over No. 1 Ohio State on Saturday night came courtesy of a strategically-waged war of attrition.
The Wildcats played a game of offensive endurance in their 58-57 loss, barraging the Buckeyes with swing passes and off-the-ball movement for as long as the shot clock would allow.
Then, they picked their shots.
“That’s the best strategy for us,” senior point guard Michael Thompson said. “We’re a better team when we slow it down and play at a pace at which we’re comfortable playing at. We just wanted to run some clock down, make them guard us and have all five guys on the court touch the ball so Ohio State would guard us each and every possession.”
Not that there were many possessions to speak of. The matchup ranked as the slowest in the Big Ten this season with just 49 possessions by the end of the night.
It was something of a hold-out approach given that NU, playing without its leading scorer John Shurna, was unlikely to beat the nation’s best on the defensive grind. The Buckeyes are one of the best 3-point shooting teams in the nation and boast the conference’s fifth-leading scorer in freshman forward Jared Sullinger.
Ohio State entered Saturday’s matchup fresh off a morale-boosting 87-64 rout of No. 12 Purdue – a team that downed NU 82-69 in NU’s conference opener on Dec. 31..
“Yesterday in practice when it didn’t look like John (Shurna) was going to play, we just said, ‘Well, they can guard us,'”coach Bill Carmody said. “We weren’t too sure if some of their bigger guys could play some of our guys a bit, you know, just keep moving and try to control the game with our offense.”
Both Ohio State and NU are the top-scoring teams in the conference, but the Cats simply refused to hand the ball over on Saturday, limiting the Buckeyes to their lowest point total in conference play so far to tie their lowest offensive performance of the season. The last time Ohio State struggled that much to get on the scoreboard was in its 58-44 win over No. 22 Florida State in the non-conference slate.
The Buckeyes only mustered 37 shots on the night, tying for their lowest number during Ohio State coach Thad Matta’s 7-year career with the team.
“We had some spurts, but we’ve got to give Northwestern credit. They never cracked,” Matta said. “They just kept coming at us and had a rhythm going. We had talked about changing our defense just to take that rhythm away.”
Even when the Buckeyes’ defense or the shot clock forced the Cats to put up a shot, NU managed to get the ball back with surprising consistency.
NU out-rebounded Ohio State 31-20. Seventeen of the Cats’ boards came on offense, far surpassing the three offensive rebounds the Buckeyes managed by the end of the night. Still, it was not enough to counter a stand-out performance from Sullinger, who led Ohio State with a team-high 21 points and eight rebounds.
“With Shurna out, my coaches wanted me to step up and provide a little bit of rebounding and a physical presence inside,” senior forward Mike Capocci said. “Obviously Sullinger’s much bigger than I am, so it was a pretty big challenge to battle him down there, but it was a good team effort and we did what we could on him.”
