The Scarlet and Gray came away with the win, but the result showed two different Ohio State teams
A quick look at the 94-62 scoreline for No. 21 Ohio State women’s basketball team’s win over Northern Kentucky, and it looks about right. A 32-point victory for a power conference over a midmajor. Watch the game itself, and it was anything but comfortable. The Buckeyes had to claw themselves out of a hole of their own digging.
For the second game in a row, Ohio State came out flat. On Sunday, it was the Northwestern Wildcats and a six-point deficit entering the second quarter. On Thursday against Northern Kentucky Norse, the Buckeyes fell to an early 12-point deficit in 5:15 of the first quarter.
“We did not show up with the focus intensity that we needed to do to kind of impose our will in the game from the start, and they made us pay,” head coach Kevin McGuff told reporters.
Northern Kentucky made the start of Thursday’s game look easy. A little too easy. The Norse had open shots from deep and nearly empty lanes to get to the basket. It was easy because Ohio State once again looked flat. With little work done on defense, with the Norse starting the game 7-of-10 from the floor, the offense could not get going. The Buckeyes took shots, but few of them added points to the scoreboard.
The Buckeyes went 1-of-6 from the floor to start the game; none of the shots were taken inside the paint.
“If we’re missing, we don’t want to take several in a row. We got to finally get to the free-throw line or get the ball around the basket,” said McGuff. “I thought we were open. We were shooting. We weren’t making them. So we’ve got to find a way to get around the basket and just give a different shot.”
Ohio State listened and got itself back into the game, but only momentarily. In the second quarter, as some shots fell for the Buckeyes, the lead changed five times. Ohio State could not get on any sustained run of form, and the Norse kept responding. The two-point Northern Kentucky lead at the end of the first quarter increased to five points at halftime. Then the other Buckeyes came out for the second half.
McGuff’s side came back through its defense. After scoring 13 points off turnovers in the first half, Ohio State’s defense rattled off 17 in the third quarter alone, plus another 16 in the fourth. The Norse could not find room to breathe with the speed and intensity the second-half Buckeyes possessed. Ohio State was a team possessed.
Guards Kennedy Cambridge and Ava Watson led the way with a combined seven steals in the third quarter. The two guards combined for 12 in the second half and 17 for the entire game. Cambridge had 10 of those, the most since former Buckeye guard Jacy Sheldon had 10 steals against Boston College at the start of the 2022-23 season. Anytime Watson came into the game, Ohio State looked better on defense and overall calmer.
“I’m trying to learn off of them,” said point guard Jaloni Cambridge about the play of Kennedy Cambridge and Watson. “I’m doing the best that I can to do the thing that they’re doing, but they’ve both been so good defensively all their life.”
The former AAU teammate of Watson and younger half sister of Kennedy Cambridge, Jaloni Cambridge, did her part offensively, which is nothing new this season. Jaloni Cambridge led all scorers with 33 points, 20 more points than the next closest Buckeye. The sophomore guard led scoring for the eighth time in nine games. The only reason the guard did not lead in the ninth game was that Jaloni Cambridge only played 15 minutes of the 130-32 rout of the Niagara Purple Eagles on Nov. 30.
Overall, the game ended comfortably for the Buckeyes. Ohio State scored 26 of the first 30 points in the third quarter, earned a 17-point lead, and never looked back. That snowballed into a 56-19 second-half scoring advantage for the home side.
“I think we’re kind of like an all-or-nothing team. When we’re playing really hard and fighting, scratching, clawing from 94 feet, and we’re making ourselves very difficult to play against,” said McGuff. “When we’re not, we’re really easy to play against. And that was the tale of two halves, and there’s not much in between. And so we’d better figure out real quick that we’ve got to get that going for 40 minutes, or else we’re gonna somebody’s gonna make us pay quickly.”
So far this season, another Buckeyes “all or nothing” performance came against the No. 1 UConn Huskies. After Ohio State stayed neck-and-neck with the reigning national champions for one quarter, where shots fell and stops happened on defense, the other Buckeyes came out to score only six points in the second quarter and lost in a humbling 100-68 defeat.
In 15 days, it’s a daytime matchup against the No. 4 UCLA Bruins to kick Big Ten basketball back off. A team led by unanimous Big Ten Preseason Player of the Year Lauren Betts, the same program that dispatched the Buckeyes by 29 points in the 24-25 conference tournament.
A couple of weeks after UCLA is No. 7 Maryland. Eight days after that is No. 8 TCU. Six days after that is No. 11 Iowa. So on and so on. The gauntlet has not yet begun, but the Buckeyes are on the doorstep.
Can Ohio State give its all, or will it walk out of the conference season with nothing?
Category: General Sports
