As a head basketball coach at a place like Ohio State, you never really know how a team is going to respond to the start of a new season. The crossroads of new personalities and situations are often unknown territory, and even returning guys can have a different mindset in a new year.
Now, mix all of that together with a global pandemic, and arguably the toughest and deepest league in the country, and things become even more uncertain.
That’s where this year’s Buckeye squad comes in. There is a returning nucleus of guys that were expected to play significant minutes and mean a lot to the team. But there was also some turnover on the roster with guys transferring in and out of the program that was always going to be a part of whatever recipe for success Chris Holtmann and staff tried to cook up in the basketball lab.
It didn’t start out on a high note early on, but as the season has gone on, this Ohio State team has gotten significantly better in a hurry in the midst of all that uncertainty. The team is a highly efficient offensive ball club that seems to have both the mentally and physically tough aptitude to put the talent together with desire and purpose.
The result has been one of the most improved and skilled teams we’ve seen in Columbus in a long, long time. The Buckeyes are currently on one of the hottest streaks in the country, winning five-straight, and eight of its last nine. Ohio State has climbed all the way from out of the top 25 in both major polls, to a top-five club that is threatening to become a No. 1 seed in the NCAA Tournament. It sits just half a game out of first place in the Big Ten.
New AP Ranking just dropped 👍#Team122 #GoBuckeyes pic.twitter.com/SPnIHSzWuO
— Ohio State Hoops (@OhioStateHoops) February 8, 2021
Many fans are pinching themselves with the run this team is on, because it doesn’t seem real. But what does the head coach himself think about what he’s seen?
We asked Holtmann after the game if even he has been surprised by what he’s seen from Ohio State, and we were a bit surprised by his answer. It wasn’t coach-speak, but brutal honesty, because that’s who Holtmann is.
“I don’t think you ever anticipate, in this league, winning whatever it’s been,” Holtmann told Buckeyes Wire. “I don’t think you ever — to your point — anticipate that … I don’t mind admitting and saying I felt optimistic about this group, but I’m also not going to ignore the fact that there’s some surprising things in terms of — I think we’ve gelled in a quicker way.
“We’ve also seen guys, really good players emerge into really good players, but you don’t always know if that’s going to happen. You just don’t know what a team’s collective spirit is going to be from year-to-year. We’re still writing our story so I’m hesitant to say too much, but yeah, felt really good. Really good.”
Pressed about what he feels is the main reason why this team has gotten so much better so quickly with all that it has had to deal with, Holtmann talked about player development and the laurels of teamwork, but then boiled it down to one thing when he thought more about it.
“Buy-in has been phenomenal. It’s been phenomenal. And it’s hard to quantify what that means for a team.”
Always the coach though, and not wanting to live in the past and get too caught up in accomplishments to date when there are still goals to accomplish, Holtmann talked about the need to forge ahead with the same mindset and purpose.
“If we continue to have that (buy-in), we’ll see what story we can write.”
Ohio State will put the pen to paper again on this 2020-2021 novel on Saturday against Indiana in the Schott.
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