WEST LAFAYETTE, Ind. — The Ohio State Buckeyes were well-coached enough to go on the road, into the cauldron of cacophony that is Mackey Arena on its best night, go up against the No. 3 team in this particular week of this peculiar college basketball season, and somehow go home celebrating a one-point victory.
They also were well-rehearsed enough to insist that they weren't at all concerned that if they hadn't found a way to upset the Purdue Boilermakers — who entered on a 19-game winning streak — then any hope of winning the Big Ten Conference regular-season championship would have been finished.
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“We were just worried about this game and winning this game, just coming into a hostile environment and getting a win,” said improbable hero Andre Wesson, who banked in a 3-pointer that gave OSU its first second-half lead just 76 seconds from the end.
“We weren't thinking about that. We were just thinking game by game and one game at a time,” said improbable hero Musa Jallow, a freshman who scored 10 points and hit three times from 3-point range after entering with a 2.4 scoring average and no 3-pointers in this calendar year.
“We knew, but that wasn't the focus. The game plan was to find the best way to beat Purdue and keep all the noise away from us, away from the locker room,” said likely hero Keita Bates-Diop, the leading contender for Big Ten Player of the Year and the man who tipped in the game-winning basket with 2.8 seconds remaining.
No. 14 @OhioStateHoops has gone into Mackey and snapped No. 3 Purdue's D-I leading 19-game winning streak!
— Big Ten Network (@BigTenNetwork) February 8, 2018
And the B1G's leading scorer, @KBD_33, converted the winning putback to help seal it. The Ohio State Buckeyes are now in first place in the Big Ten: pic.twitter.com/S25JRNhovk
It was so perfectly choreographed that a reporter asked Jallow if coach Chris Holtmann had the players rehearse these answers. “I mean, yeah, kinda,” Jallow said.
Holtmann tried to explain all this away by saying that, in a coach’s mind, “It's still early. I guess to others it may not be.”
It's not early. The start of the Big Ten Tournament is less than three weeks away. With Ohio State beating Purdue 64-63 Wednesday night, each team owns a 12-1 record in conference play. Michigan State is a game back at 11-2. Had the Buckeyes dropped this one, they'd have trailed the Boilermakers by two games with only five to play.
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Even though one of Purdue’s remaining games comes Saturday at MSU, a Buckeyes loss here would have all but eliminated them from contention. Now, with this result, the race is smoking, as compelling as any major-conference race — and a week ahead of all the others because the Big Ten will play its conference tournament a week earlier so that it can be staged at Madison Square Garden.
“This is not one of those years like last year, where we were 14-4 and you could win the league,” Purdue coach Matt Painter said afterward. “That's not going to happen. You’re going to have to be better than that.”
Purdue certainly will need to be better in its showdown at Michigan State than it was against Ohio State. Although the Mackey crowd was sizzling even before tipoff, the Boilers seemed to lack their customary intensity.
They got 18 points from 7-2 center Isaac Haas, but he was quiet after Holtmann chose to use the 6-6 Wesson against him and hassle him with quickness. Guard Carsen Edwards' second-half barrage of 3-pointers accelerated him toward a 28-point night, but backcourt partner P.J. Thompson was shut out.
The Boilermakers committed 12 turnovers, some of them simple fumbles that could be rung up as unforced errors. They grabbed only two offensive rebounds on a night where they missed 27 shots, and they failed twice in the final 25 seconds to grab defensive rebounds that were available and might have clinched the game.
Purdue ranks No. 3 in the nation in offensive efficiency and No. 12 in defensive efficiency, one of only two teams to rank in the top 20 in both categories. But the Boilers are only 191st in offensive rebounding percentage, and Wednesday it looked like a miracle they could rank that high.
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“We have to do a better job of understanding who we are at times,” Painter said. “We’re not going to be the best rebounding team in the country, but we can be better than we are right now.”
Perhaps the winning streak and the glamorous ranking had grown a bit heavy to carry around.
“We didn’t want to lose this game, but we'll be all right,” said forward Vincent Edwards. “Good teams move past the bad times.”
There'll be some hard times, almost certainly, when Purdue shows up Saturday afternoon at the Breslin Center for the one game the Boilers and Spartans will play this side of the Big Ten Tournament. It is another opportunity for Purdue to create separation in the title race over one of its few rivals.
The Buckeyes won this game simply by outbattling Purdue’s band of seniors — not by a lot, but by enough. Bates-Diop was masterfully defended by Dakota Mathias but still managed 18 points and 11 rebounds. Included in his 9-of-18 shooting line was a ridiculous backward tip over his head; it was the only shot Mathias made available to him, so he pulled it off.
Ohio State gets to play Iowa at home Saturday before beginning a challenging two-game road trip against Penn State and Michigan.
So, OK, maybe it is a little early, in that sense.
Without the effort the Buckeyes delivered on this night, though, it would have been too late for them.