Ohio State Basketball: Canceled games could doom any tourney run
By Jay Wilhelm
Ohio State basketball has another game canceled or postponed. These missed games are going to make it difficult to put together any tournament run.
We now know that Ohio State Men’s Basketball team has their Saturday, January 22nd game vs Nebraska marked as postponed because of COVID issues within the Cornhusker program. This marks another game on the schedule for the Buckeyes, which also included the December 28th game against New Orleans, that has the team not getting in some competitive minutes.
Luckily, they were able to sneak in a home game against IUPUI this past Tuesday so the team wouldn’t get another big gap between games. It was a game Ohio State won 83-37, moving them to 12-4 on the season thus far. OSU has now had a total of four games canceled or postponed on the season.
The most significant was when they had three games canceled in late December meaning the team sat without a game from the 11th to January 2nd. Without the IUPUI game, they would’ve sat from the 16th of January until their next game which is currently scheduled for the 27th at Minnesota.
These gaps in the schedule which are nobody’s fault could doom the Buckeyes with any chance of having any type of tournament run, whether it be in the Big Ten tournament or the NCAA Tournament at the end of the season.
Basketball, almost more than any other sport, is about rhythm. With rhythm can come consistency. When you are forced to miss that many games it is extremely hard to gain and keep any rhythm. Then there is an issue of conditioning that gets lost.
Of course, you could run and do things in practice, but nothing can duplicate the real thing. The game conditions in the Big Ten are impossible to get outside of real game action. The next thing that could get in the way of a tourney run from having canceled games is the experience you continually get playing together with your teammates.
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Of course, you could say that they’d at least be fresher than other teams that didn’t have those breaks, but all of those things you gain through the course of a full season is more important and is in serious jeopardy for the Buckeyes as they continue to have questions about their schedule and could make it that much harder for the Ohio State basketball team to put together a nice tournament run.