Ultimately, the story of Cleveland State’s season opener, a 104-69 loss to Ohio State on Tuesday night in Columbus, was both “too much” and “too little.”
Too much Jaloni Cambridge. The Buckeyes’ superstar freshman point guard – the second-ranked recruit in the country, according to ESPN – showed that she’s also going to be in the top five of plenty of other lists very soon. In her first collegiate game, Cambridge did just about whatever she wanted on the floor, converting 12 of her 14 field goal attempts for a game-high 31 points. The Nashville native added six rebounds, six assists and five steals as well.
“What can’t she do?” Vikings head coach Chris Kielsmeier rhetorically asked. “She doesn’t get tired. She played 94 feet for all the minutes that she was out there, and ran the game in an incredible way. She looked like she was a fifth-year senior. She’s special, obviously.”
“I was feeling good,” Cambridge said. “I just got to my spots. My teammates allowed me to get to the right spots and had the confidence in me to make those shots.”
Too many of the big-game jitters that have often plagued Cleveland State in contests against power conference foes. The Vikings turned the ball over 24 times, ten of those in the first quarter when the visitors seemed particularly rattled by OSU’s well-honed pressure. By the end of that opening frame, the defending Big Ten regular season champions led 24-9 and were finished checking the rear-view mirror for the evening.
“I was really happy that we imposed our will on the game from the start and put them back on their heels a little bit,” Buckeyes head coach Kevin McGuff observed.
“That certainly hurt us,” Kielsmeier added. “It didn’t allow us to get off to a very good start, especially when we subbed and turned it over a couple times back-to-back. We just have not played well in these games against these top-20 teams. But very few do, it’s not just a Cleveland State thing.”
Too much of a Buckeye team that was often able to flex its speed and depth, with nine different scarlet and gray players scoring at least six points. Conversely, the Vikings’ depth was taxed by some inconveniently-placed foul trouble, including reigning Horizon League Player of the Year Colbi Maples and key post players Jordana Reisma and Paulina Hernandez.
“I honestly think we were a fast team last year, but this team, I feel like we’re just very quick, very fast,” Ohio State star forward Cotie McMahon said. “We have some really good defenders all around, so we can really utilize that.”
“I think we can be a really deep team, we showed that tonight,” McGuff added. “I was really happy, because we have [a lot of] young players, and the more we can invest in them early on and give them meaningful minutes, they’re really going to come along and create the depth that I think we can have.”
CSU did eventually settle into the game in some respects, scoring a more-than-passable 60 points over the final 30 minutes. However, that’s when “too much” became “too little.”
Too little defense. Though the Vikings were productive on one end of the floor, they offered the resistance of a wet paper towel on the other. The Buckeyes put up a staggering 62 points in the second half alone, carving up CSU from just about every spot on the court, including behind the arc (Ohio State finished 10-for-21 from three, led by McMahon’s four triples) and right down the middle (OSU scored a whopping 48 points in the paint).
“We’re not defending anybody,” Kielsmeier offered bluntly. “Nobody’s defending anybody. It’s like our defense didn’t even exist. We’ve gotta get better defensively very quickly.”
Too little execution. For much of the evening, Cleveland State bore scant resemblance to the program that’s reliably flirted with 30 wins over the last couple of seasons. Beyond the defensive woes, the Vikings struggled to get the ball to the paint, including on their trademark drives that often result in either easy buckets or free throws. The two players usually responsible for a lot of that, Maples and Destiny Leo, combined for 19 tallies and just three free throw attempts.
“Our offensive ball movement, our chemistry and playing with each other, is really off,” Kielsmeier said. “Our defensive transition is not good [either]. Jaloni [Cambridge] got it on us about as fast as you could. However, some of those were made baskets. You can’t not get your defense set after a made basket, I don’t care who you are and how fast you are, that’s just poor effort.”
One of Cleveland State’s bright spots was Mickayla Perdue. The senior guard shook off a slow start to finish with 29 points (just shy of her career high, 31, established in the Vikings’ WBIT first round game at Toledo back in March) on 9-for-20 shooting, including four three-pointers and two fouls drawn on deep attempts that resulted in three made free throws each. Sara Guerreiro also clocked a solid outing, with 14 points and a team-best 7 rebounds.
However, Kielsmeier was quick to redirect back to his team’s shortcomings.
“We’re just not playing well,” he said. “We shouldn’t be surprised really by this outcome, the way we’ve gone about it on a day-to-day basis. We’re not playing hard enough, we’re not playing individually well, which obviously causes us to not be playing very well as a team. There are a lot of things we’ve gotta get fixed quickly.”
