Buckeyes interior is looking up, on-court improvements are needed and the in-season tournament madness has to stop.
Look at the scores of both games for Ohio State women’s basketball last week and it looks pretty good. Wins by 23 and 36 points, a double-double for a new forward and a regular season record growing to 7-0 are great, but it wasn’t all good at the Daytona Beach Classic.
Here’s what we learned about the Buckeyes, both good and bad, from their time on the Atlantic Coast.
Petty in the paint
Since now-WNBA forward Dorka Juhasz left Ohio State for UConn after the 2020-21 season, the Buckeyes have struggled mightily near the basket. Getting out-rebounded and out-muscled near the rim has become a part of the program’s recent identity.
Was it a problem? Yes. Did Ohio State overcome it and still win? Yes.
The Scarlet and Gray have two regular season titles and a trip to the Elite Eight, after all, but when the Elizabeth Kitleys and Hannah Stuelkes of the world came calling, and Ohio State lost, there were always questions on how far this side could go if they could go like-for-like in every spot on the floor.
Forward Ajae Petty showed at Daytona that the Buckeyes are closer to calling that concern a thing of the past.
On Thanksgiving, Petty had a season high in points (24) and her first double-double as a Buckeye. It was the eighth game of the forward’s career scoring at least 20 points and 21st double-double.
“I didn’t like how I played last game,” said Petty heading into Thursday’s game. “So I just went back, watched a lot of film, just tried to stay calm and just trust the process.”
That trust worked out, taking advantage of an Old Dominion side stretched out by the Buckeyes’ perimeter threats. Of that group, Jaloni Cambridge and Petty had the strongest connection, sending in five of the freshman’s six assists to the Ohio State big.
No surprise who the Thanksgiving Dub Crown goes to: AND ONE AP ️@ajaepetty | #GoBucks pic.twitter.com/yPjZTxwXOh
— Ohio State Women’s Basketball (@OhioStateWBB) November 28, 2024
Petty followed it up with a 17-point, nine-rebound, performance against Utah State, showing her two most consistent performances back-to-back. It might be a sign that Petty’s comfort has grown, along with understanding of what’s expected of her in the system.
How will that translate Sunday when the No. 21 Illinois Fighting Illini comes to Columbus, complete with forward Kendall Bostic who averages 16.3 rebounds and 15.9 points per game in four previous matchups against Ohio State?
Chance Gray from deep
In the same vein of Ohio State’s lackluster paint presence, three-point shooting wasn’t the same last year for the Buckeyes with Taylor Mikesell moving on to the professional ranks. Daytona also showed that the former Oregon Duck Mikesell has an heir apparent in former Oregon Duck Chance Gray.
The Buckeyes’ starting shooting guard never hit the top-10 in hitting three-point shots with the former Pac-12 Ducks. Now, in after seven games, Gray is second in the Big Ten.
It’s early in the season, but Gray averages 3.3 makes per game, with no Buckeyes averaging more than two per game last season. In Mikesell’s last season, she averaged 3.2 made shots per game, but that was with a heavily injured Ohio State backcourt, and defenses often shadowing Mikesell all game, or doubling up.
Now, hitting nine shots from deep against the Charlotte 49ers helps Gray’s numbers so far, but against Utah State Gray was a perfect 3-of-3 from three-point range.
“They weren’t really trying to give us open looks,” said Gray. “They’re running a triangle when me and Ava [Watson] were in the game, but we just stayed simple inside out and then that was that’s what worked for us.”
Gray comes from a coaching family, and it shows with how quickly the guard adjusted to McGuff’s system. While the guard isn’t doing as much action towards the basket, like in previous years with Oregon, Gray reads defenses and is showing Ohio State fans that she can stretch out opposing defenses.
Buckeyes have some work to do
Teams don’t want to hit their peak in November and December, obviously, but the two games in Daytona showed that Ohio State has a long way to go before hitting it, which is a good thing.
The Buckeyes had steep margins of victory, but the two games shouldn’t have been that close. Against Utah State, a game where they cruised to a 36-point victory, McGuff was loud in the second half,. not happy with the play on the court.
“I thought we made it too complicated. We wanted to be really aggressive but keep it simple,” said McGuff. “We just made it a little too complicated.”
Maybe that was the speed of the game causing Ohio State to overthink, but the Aggies tried to run with the Buckeyes, which normally spells disaster for opposing teams. Defensively, it worked with the Scarlet and Gray forcing a season high 34 turnovers, but offensively they also had a season high giving the ball away 18 times.
Ohio State also struggled on layup attempts. To the players’ credit, the Aggies were contesting the layups in the half court, but Buckeye players struggled to play through minimal contact.
On Thursday, Ohio State outscored the Monarchs by 20 points in the first half, holding them to 14 total points. In the third quarter, Old Dominion outscored the Buckeyes 18-15. The reason? Continually putting their opponents on the foul line, giving up 10 free throw attempts in the quarter in a game where they only put ODU on the line 14 times.
“We got a little sloppy with our defense,” said McGuff. “And really, I will say we missed a bunch of layups. And so we couldn’t get our press set. And then they were getting out in transition off our misses. And we didn’t do a good job getting back and getting the ball in control and playing half court defense.”
There could be a bit of boredom setting in, playing against mid-major after mid-major side. Only one of the Buckeyes’ games this season ended with a margin of victory under 20 points, and that was an anomaly with the Belmont Bruins playing their best game of the season, at home.
Illinois is the big test, and the Buckeyes could still be without forward Cotie McMahon, who hasn’t played since that 67-63 victory over the Bruins.
Ohio State will get more physicality and get punished more often for their mistakes going up against a ranked Big Ten team.
Stop the streaming madness
For those who spent the $20 on BallerTV for the Daytona Beach Classic, there are no refunds.
For those who didn’t spend the money, and instead followed from afar, there wasn’t anything worth missing when it came to the production value of the games. Now, it’s easy to blame BallerTV, the obscurest of obscure streaming platforms for college basketball, but it comes down to the Coast 2 Coast women’s basketball group that put on the tournament.
BallerTV is a website that plays the streams. It’s the tournament that’s in charge of creating the stream. Now, most tournaments go with FloSports, a production team that’s known for commentary snafus and one game this year where they shared the image of the wrong player while talking about her between plays.
The Daytona Beach Classic’s production was worse.
Imagine someone holding up a phone to stream a game. That’s closer to the reality, with possibly a tripod included instead of a person holding it.
Watch the stream, and sometimes the person operating the camera forgot to move it when the play went down the court. In the game against Utah State, starting point guard Jaloni Cambridge took a big hit that made her slow to get to the free throw line. No one watching the stream could tell you what happened because the camera operator was fixated on the other side of the court when the foul happened.
There was also no commentary, which as a silver lining means no mistakes on commentating, but also no score updates, depending on the browser you used to watch. The audio and video were also not synced, meaning you heard the crowd cheer before a shot was taken.
In the final Buckeyes game of the tournament, the signal also lagged throughout the entire game for what was the most attended Ohio State game of the two days, which doesn’t say much considering there weren’t many in the Ocean Center on Thanksgiving day.
Getting the players to an exotic locale and rewarding them for their hard work is not a problem at all. They deserve it, but fans don’t deserve what the tournament provided. Ohio State doesn’t deserve how their games were produced. The rise of college basketball should put production like what was provided by Coast 2 Coast women’s basketball six feet under.