As Penn State men’s basketball sits at 3-3 on the year, the Nittany Lions are something of the Goldilocks of the Big Ten. They are not good or bad on either end of the floor, not incapable of winning against any team, but also not incapable of losing to any of them either.
There’s something to be said for this, but in the department of consistency where winning is often found, the Nittany Lions are hot or cold on any given night. And much like any team in America, a consistent presence of inconsistency is not the optimum equation against some of the best teams in country.
Heading into a Wednesday night meeting against Indiana, the Nittany Lions and coach Jim Ferry are looking to find that sweet spot, but at the same time looking to improve at their biggest weakness; interior play on both ends of the court.
‘We have to be a team that flies around the court, we have to be scrappy, we have to be scrappier, we got to do a better job of rebounding the basketball,’ Ferry said earlier this week. ‘We got to keep some guys in the paint off balance, whether that may be you know, double in a post a little bit more digging at the post a little bit more throwing different bodies out there.’
‘We don’t have Lamar [Stevens] we don’t have Mike [Watkins]. So we can’t think that we’re going to play that way, both offensively or defensively. So we really have to embrace who we are, that we have to play with great quickness and speed. We have to share the ball. And then defensively we just got get tougher, we got to grind some things out.’
Penn State is currently dead last in the Big Ten averaging just 23 defensive rebounds per game, far better on the offensive end averaging 11.5 per game, although a number that will almost certainly lower as the season goes along.
In either case the play of big man John Harrar has been admirable on the defensive end, and while he leads the team in rebounds per game, he also has certain limitations. Despite his fearlessness against any opposing big, Harrar does not possess the athleticism of his predecessor Mike Watkins. While Harrar being constantly compared to Watkins might cause one to overlook Harrar’s positive abilities, the contrast between the interior defense of this year and last is hard to avoid.
Albeit, this is as much a team issue as it is an issue entirely of Harrar’s doing.
The good news for Penn State and Ferry is that in the longterm, the Nittany Lions appear to have something in big man Abdou Tsimbila who has some of the same qualities as a younger Watkins. The problem of course, one of the newest Nittany Lions has a lot of learning to do before he’s ready to become the primary big man down low. While he has shown flashes, Tsimbila is still raw. Of course there’s nothing quite like playing in the Big Ten to sharpen your stills.
‘We’ve got to keep throwing him into the fire,’ Ferry said. ‘And then as a coaching staff, we’ve had to simplify some things ourselves. We have really made some adjustments to some things just to simplify things for him. So he doesn’t have to have 1000 things running around, you know, am I doing this? Am I doing that? No, you just do this, we’ll play around you. So that’s some of the stuff we’re working on.’
When it’s all said and done, the Nittany Lions are who they are, and that’s a fast team capable of hitting threes, running the fast break and creating turnovers.
In the long run this might win them some games, but if the Nittany Lions want to take the next step as a team, they’ll have to figure out their issues on the interior.
The bad news there, that’s something almost every team in the Big Ten already has an answer for, and an answer the Nittany Lions might not be able to overcome.
