No. 12 Ohio State women’s basketball welcomed the Indiana Hoosiers to the Schottenstein Center Thursday night on the team’s themed pajama night, and Indiana nearly caught the Buckeyes sleeping.
Head coach Kevin McGuff’s side went down 15 points in the first quarter, nearly came back in the second and then entered half time down 10 points.
Even so, Ohio State found a way to win in the 81-67 home victory. The game featured weak defense to start, a second half surge and an injury that changed the entire
trajectory of the Buckeyes’ team makeup.
Thin margin for injuries
On Monday, in Newark, New Jersey, forward Kylee Kitts left the game midway through the fourth quarter after what looked like an innocent enough moment in the game caused a shoulder injury.
A TCU pass turned into a loose ball that Kitts and Horned Frogs sophomore center Clara Silva both tried to grab. In the process, Silva grabbed the ball and a part of Kitts’ hand and twisted her torso quickly to jar the ball away, with Kitts’ arm going in the process.
Kitts returned for nearly two and a half minutes of game clock but went to the bench with 2:09 remaining and never came back off the bench. On Thursday, Kitts name sat on the availability report and the forward missed the first game of the season for Ohio State.
It put the Buckeyes in a tough spot considering McGuff’s team only has 11 players. Of those 11 athletes, only one big comes off the bench, redshirt freshman Ella Hobbs, and she averaged 3.5 minutes per game since the return to Big Ten play on Dec. 28, against No. 4 UCLA.
That absence both hurt and helped Ohio State, in a way. It hurt because in Kitts’ first season, she has showed consistently the ability to grab rebounds and defend inside the paint, with the occasional three-point shot to get the Buckeyes out of cold shooting spells. It helped because Indiana did not see it coming. Especially 5-foot-8 guard Kennedy Cambridge when she moved into the No. 5 position with center Elsa Lemmilä on the bench in foul trouble.
“Never played five my life,” Cambridge told reporters. “Our roster is already pretty short, so I think this was a good game that if something happens like this, show that we can get through with.”
There is no firm timetable on Kitts’ return, but expect more creativity in lineups with her absence. However, the victory for the Buckeyes also came against Indiana on a down season, when the Hoosiers have not won a single Big Ten game and entered Thursday struggling inside the paint.
On Sunday, Ohio State plays the inside duo of Hannah Stuelke and Ava Heiden, the No. 10 Iowa Hawkeyes’ bigs who average a combined 30.4 points and 16.3 rebounds per game.
The ideal press
Kitts’ absence was part of the need for a small lineup, but it was also fouls accumulated by Lemmilä. The sophomore Finnish big picked up her third foul early in the third quarter and spent time on the bench.
The lineup of five guards featured Jaloni Cambridge, Kennedy Cambridge, Ava Watson, Bryn Martin and Chance Gray, with a brief appearance by senior guard T’Yana Todd. In the nearly two minutes of five-guard small ball, Ohio State scored five points, forced a turnover and only allowed one shot from Indiana.
In the third quarter, when Cambridge was the de facto center for McGuff’s Buckeyes, Ohio State did play some of its best pressing defense of the season. Part of that was the combination of Kennedy Cambridge and Watson. The two guards combined for 12 steals in the game and they had three in the third quarter.
“I think that it was an effective lineup for a stretch,” McGuff said. “It’s not ideal. It’s not what we want to do, but sometimes you just got to put your best five out there when you have foul trouble and play in an organized fashion.”
At the time, the best five for Ohio State could outrun probably any team in the Big Ten. The five players that started the run accounted for all 16 steals in the game.
Later in the quarter, Lemmilä entered for seven seconds before she earned a fourth foul. For 3:29 of the game, Ohio State went back to playing small. That was the same point that the Scarlet and Gray went on a nine-point run and flipped the deficit into a lead for the first time in the game. The quick turnaround changed an anxious crowd into an ear-piercingly loud one.
“It felt electric to me, all of us were just out there screaming, showing appreciation to each other,” Watson said. “And then I think that just made us want to turn up on defense even more.”
Rebounding enigma
Indiana won the battle of the boards 30-21, which looks bad for Ohio State. After all, Indiana entered Thursday as the 18th best rebounding team in the 18-team Big Ten with 32.2 rebounds per game. Point to the absence of Kitts, who leads Ohio State with 7.1 boards per game or look at how many times the Buckeyes needed to go with a five-guard lineup.
Ohio State’s rebounding, while fewer in total, is some of the best defensive rebounding its done in Big Ten play this season.
The Buckeyes grabbed 15 rebounds out of 17 possible chances to get a defensive rebound. That is the best percentage of defensive rebounds grabbed against a Big Ten opponent this season. Ohio State took 25 more shots than Indiana due to the defense’s 26 forced turnovers. The two offensive rebounds for Indiana is the lowest rebound total allowed by the Buckeye defense.
So, the real problem of the night was not rebounding. The Buckeyes were efficient on defensive boards and stopping Indiana from getting offensive boards.
On the offensive boards, the Buckeyes did miss Kitts’ 3.1 rebounds per game when Ohio State already had possession, but the real problem was defense and a hot shooting night for a Hoosiers team built around shooters like guards Shay Ciezki and Lenée Beaumont.
“We switched a lot, and they were running some actions and trying to slip out of their screens to try to interrupt our switching,” McGuff said. “To compensate for that, you have to really communicate through that. We weren’t communicating very well, and they were making us pay.”
When Ohio State adjusted defensively, Indiana’s shooting dropped from 66.7% in the first half to only 40% in the second.
Bonus lesson: injury reports
On every game day, the Big Ten releases game reports showing who is and is not available to play. A player can be out, questionable or out for the season. Kitt’s name showed up Thursday as out, but for how long? After the game, McGuff was less than specific.
“She [Kitts] sustained a shoulder injury versus TCU and couldn’t play tonight, and probably be day-to-day for a while,” McGuff said.
That is about as clear as most Central Ohio salt-stained vehicle windows.
Kitts is day-to-day, but the gap between the first day of missing action to the last is the big unknown. There is strategy to not saying when a player returns, because a team cannot adequately prepare if availability is up in the air. Thursday showed that Ohio State needs to take advantage of any edge with the lack of interior depth ready to step into games against ranked opponents like Iowa, Maryland and Michigan in the coming weeks.
There is precedent set for injury information for the Buckeyes. During the 2022-23 season, point guard Jacy Sheldon suffered a foot injury that forced her to miss all but six regular season games, with limited availability in the Big Ten Tournament. What was Sheldon’s status during the 21-game absence? Day-to-day.
