MINNEAPOLIS – Puff Johnson skipped down the court, face buried in his jersey just moments after his would-have-been game winner clanged off the front iron, Penn State falling 61-59 to Indiana in the second round of the Big Ten Tournament. The Hoosiers took a two-point lead with just five seconds to go thanks to Anthony Leal’s put-back basket, and while Johnson’s look moments later was a good one, it was ultimately just a hair short.
It’s kind of amazing that the game was ever this close in the first place. Penn State shot just 36% from the floor in the second half, navigating a foul-heavy night that saw Qudus Wahab and Nick Kern both foul out of the game while Johnson picked up four of his own. The Nittany Lions posted a 4-for-21 mark in layup situations — a product in no small part of towering Indiana center Kel’el Ware — while turning the ball over eight times in the final 20 minutes of play. Ace Baldwin made three of his 15 attempts from the field, the usually efficient Wahab going 0-for-8 while Johnson went 4-for-11 from the field, leading the way with 16 points thanks mostly to seven made free throws.
All the same, the Nittany Lions shooting poorly was not a particularly new feature to Penn State’s 2023-24 season, and neither was overcoming it. So in spite of the struggles, the Nittany Lions were still there in the final moments with a chance to win, even leading by one with 2:38 to go. The final shot just didn’t fall.
From a wider lens, Penn States’ loss likely caps the season off with a 16-17 record, unless a handful of things transpire which lead to the Nittany Lions making the NIT or accepting an appearance in one of the more minor innovational postseason tournaments. At present there is no indication either of those things would happen.
At face value 16-17 is a lukewarm result. Penn State did some good things, some bad things, but also came up not that short of a 20-win season. In total, the Nittany Lions lost twice in overtime, once to a Bucknell team it would almost certainly beat now, blundered a 20+ point lead at Minnesota and fell short by single digits in four other games. There were wins to be had, small moments that could have turned 16 into something more than what it was. If nothing else, the Pat Chambers era saw Penn State surpass the 16-win mark just three times in nine tries, albeit an imperfect comparison.
For head coach Mike Rhoades, it’s hard to ignore the bumps in the road. Coaches are programmed that way, but it’s also hard to ignore the situation that he inherited. Penn State left last March with nearly no players on the roster, no coaching staff and no real direction. In the ensuing months, Rhoades and his somewhat equally pasted together staff would not only cobble together a team out of the transfer portal but manage to tease the possibility of making the NCAA Tournament in the process. In the very least this group proved itself to be a real pain for much more established, less chaotically formed rosters. Two wins over ranked teams are an indication of that as much as anything.
“I take great pride in it,” Rhoades said following the game. “When you spend so much time with young people and then you demand them to work really hard and to get outside of their own comfort zone, there’s a lot of rewards for that as a coach, and there’s a lot of joy in that too to watch them grow and all that. I love that part of it. I love that more sometimes than the games. I love the games and the competition, but to help a young man go from here to there as a basketball player and as a young man to mature and understand how adversity is a lifetime thing, and we can use basketball as the vehicle to help these guys understand that. I love that part of it. I’m really proud of these guys.
“I just think we had moments throughout the year where all of us got really excited saying, can we take the next step? Can we take the next step? You’ve got to go through it all, the highs and the lows, and tough moments like this. If we’re going to build a program the right way to get to the top of this league, today’s got to burn for a long, long time until we put the uniform back on. And you’ve got to live in the gym. As a coaching staff, we’ve got to get better. How can we get our guys bigger, stronger, faster and better players. How can we go out and get the right pieces to make us better? All these experiences we had this year built some foundation for us, but now it’s — and the close games, the tough things that we went through, it’s got to burn you to go to work and to get better because that’s what it’s all about.”
In the immediate future Penn State will await the decisions of Johnson and Baldwin Jr., both of whom have the ability to exercise a final year of eligibility. Their decisions will shape much of how Penn State’s offseason unfolds from a strategic standpoint. Neither were committal about their futures as of Thursday night, saying that they still had to talk things over with the coaches, staff and families. How uncertain they truly are about their futures is unknown, but there’s no question that their choices will be the first major and formative dominos to fall.
“We’ve had some conversations,” Rhoades said. “But (it has been) task at hand; that’s the most important thing. Let’s be where our feet are. I’m always going to do what’s best for the young men, not what’s best for me. These parents give their sons to us. We want to give them back to them better young men and better basketball players and good opportunities. I love both those guys. They’ve been great this year. I’ve recruited Puff’s brother because I’ve known his family for a long time. I’ve gone through some great things with Ace and been with him and his family for a long time. So I love him and respect him, and we’re going to do what’s best for those guys. We’ll have conversations as we move along. I always say real talk, I call it. Let’s have real talk and go from there. But it’s about making the best decisions for these young men.”
No matter what they decide, Penn State men’s basketball will once again look very different by this time next year. The Nittany Lions will have undergone some unavoidable turnover by virtue of graduation and plenty of new faces will have joined along the way. But for a program that has bathed itself in the hopes of the perpetual “next season,” Penn State will head into the summer feeling good about how the Mike Rhoades era started. Flaws, nitpicks or mistakes aside, Rhoades and his staff faced an unenviable mountain of obstacles and more often than not, deftly navigated it.
What that means for the future is uncertain, but the story of Penn State men’s basketball in 2023-24 might be as much about the year that it wasn’t — an ugly disjointed attempt at patchwork roster basketball – as anything else. Avoiding that may have been the season’s biggest win.
“We’ve come a long way,” Rhoades said. “We’ve had a lot of ups and downs. We’ve had some great moments and real tough moments and learning moments. But like you saw today, we’ve got a group of guys that really fought. I thought these guys, as they went along— I think we got together the first time June 14. They made themselves into a team that people in the Big Ten didn’t want to play against. In today’s world, that’s hard to do very quickly. I’m proud of our guys that way.”
