It was a bad week for Rutgers basketball to put it mildly. Not only did they give their worst performance of the season so far against Michigan State, but they followed it up with a poor showing against Ohio State.
“This is the league that we play in so playing great teams, we’ve got to get healthy, 100 percent healthy, but these guys are good guys,” Head Coach Steve Pikiell said after the team’s 79-68 loss to the Buckeyes. “We’ll keep working, that's what we do. We get better, we improve, it’s six days to work on Wisconsin and you know we’re right in the league where you need to be.”
This past week was part of a larger issue considering the Scarlet Knights have not only lost three straight, but have dropped four of their last five games and appear to have lost the mojo they had earlier in the season.
“These guys are great, they really are. I mean you’re going to have these kinds of stretches, these guys come to practice every day, they come in to watch film,” Pikiell continued. “The balls start going in and we’ll start rebounding and defending better, I’m very confident in that.”
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While Rutgers came into the season with a high-powered offense, it seems to have dissipated at least for the time being as they were held to 45 points in their matchup with the Spartans. Not only that, but they were down by as much as 22 points in the second half against Ohio State before going on a run to make the game seem more competitive than it was.
“They’re well coached, I thought they made some really difficult shots so tip of the hat to them,” Pikiell said of the Buckeyes. “I thought we kept grinding, even at the end I liked the last 11, 12 minutes. I thought that was Rutgers basketball and unfortunately you have to play 40 minutes in this league and we’ll get ourselves to that point.”
If the Scarlet Knights are going to pull themselves out of this rut, then they are going to have to improve in the rebounding department as well considering they have been out-rebounded in their last five games, including getting obliterated 45-25 on the boards against Michigan State.
“We got to continue to push the ball when we can but a lot of that is about stops and we obviously, giving up 79 points tonight, didn’t have a lot of stops in the basketball game,” Pikiell said. “Rebounding factors into how much you can run and teams know that we like to run so they are not going to let us get up and down the court the way we want.”
If there is any lone bright spot to this otherwise tough week for Rutgers, it is that Caleb McConnell seems to be rounding into form since returning on Jan. 2 against Iowa from a back injury that was originally going to sideline him for the season. In his 23 minutes of game action, the junior guard scored 12 points on 4-for-9 shooting and even recorded a four-point play.
“He’s been through a lot and he’s a great kid,” Pikiell said of McConnell. “I mean he’s had a year off so then we threw him right in the middle of the league season so he didn’t have any games to kind of get his legs under him, but he’s a good leader for us and he’s tough.”
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