INDIANAPOLIS –– The performance may not have yielded any shaking in the boots of potential Big Ten opponents, but Minnesota survived its war of attrition with Northwestern Wednesday to earn a spot in the second round against Ohio State.
The No. 5 seed Buckeyes (18-8, 12-8 Big Ten) have a shot to both end a four-game losing streak and avenge a Jan. 3 loss to the No. 13 seed Golden Gophers (14-14, 7-14) to open their postseason run Thursday, and on the other end awaits No. 4 seed Purdue in the quarterfinals.
“We had a great game against them earlier, but this is a new season right now, this is March,” Minnesota senior guard Marcus Carr said Wednesday. “We’re obviously two different teams, but we’re gonna go out to execute and do the same thing and end with the same result. They’re a great team and they’ve been playing well, we’re gonna come with our game plan and just look to execute.”
Ohio State takes on a Minnesota team riding its first win in the past nine games, and just its fourth since beating the Buckeyes 77-60 in a relatively one-sided affair in the teams’ first and only prior meeting this season.
The Golden Gophers grinded out a 51-46 win against the Wildcats without multiple starters in the first game of the Big Ten Tournament Wednesday, a game that featured just 47 points of offense between both teams through the first 20 minutes, and a combined shooting percentage of .336 by game’s end.
Despite beginning the game on a 16-2 run through the first 11-plus minutes and holding Northwestern to just 20 points at halftime, Minnesota looked as though it might let the game slip away, as the Wildcats mustered a 16-3 run to take a seven-point lead with 4:15 to play.
“We made it ugly on ourselves, we did a lot of things to shoot ourselves in the foot, but at the end of the day, just the way that our team is right now, we’re gonna have to win games ugly,” Carr said. “We’re gonna have to fight, claw, scratch things out and be able to pull it out in the end, and that’s what we were able to do today, and we have to ride that momentum into tomorrow as well.”
Carr, the Big Ten’s third-leading scorer in the regular season, was just 1-for-7 from the field to that point, but he came alive to help engineer a 12-0 Gopher run to finish off the game with a comeback victory.
Carr, who is 3-0 against the Buckeyes in the past two seasons with a game-winner in one of those matchups, will no doubt be a primary point of concern for Chris Holtmann’s Buckeye defense on Thursday, despite scoring just 10 points on 3-of-10 shooting against Northwestern.
Carr is just three games removed from a 41-point explosion against Nebraska, and has both a 35-point game and a near 24-point-per-game career average against Ohio State in his tenure with the Gophers.
The leading scorer in the last matchup against Ohio State though, 7-foot forward Liam Robbins, was sidelined for Minnesota’s Wednesday win.
Robbins, who scored 27 points against the Buckeyes in January, has missed the past several games with a sprained ankle. Should Robbins return on Thursday, Ohio State big men E.J. Liddell, Kyle Young and Zed Key could face yet another significant size mismatch down low.
The Gophers could also be without starting forward Gabe Kalscheur, who has been out with a broken finger since mid-February.
“I don’t know about Liam, I guess we’ll kind of see tomorrow,” head coach Richard Pitino said. “Obviously he was terrific that game, that was his best game by far and he was a difference-maker. We’re obviously a clearly better team with he and Gabe in the lineup.”
Even when Robbins has been on the court in the back half of the season though, he’s been much less effective than the version that went off against the Buckeyes, averaging just 9.1 points per game on 37.6 percent shooting since the Ohio State game.
For a Buckeye team that’s allowed its last four opponents to shoot a combined 50 percent from the floor and nearly 40 percent from 3, Minnesota’s underwhelming offensive output on Wednesday may be a positive indicator.
Although it secured a win, Minnesota shot just 31 percent from the floor, 27.8 percent from 3 and 41.7 percent from the free throw line against Northwestern.
“We’re not gonna be a masterpiece by any means right now just because we’re down so many guys, but you’re gonna have to win ugly like that,” Pitino said. “We did that.”
Still, the Golden Gophers will have gotten a postseason warm-up under them prior to tip-off, which is scheduled to start 25 minutes after 11:30 a.m.’s Michigan State-Maryland matchup ends at Lucas Oil Stadium.
