All Aboard the Good Ship PSU Hoops – Our Blue Sky to Football’s Dark Cloud

The word “optimism” has almost always meant something a little different when the topic turns to Penn State men’s basketball.

If you’re not an optimistic person by nature, you probably aren’t investing much emotional capital into the Nittany Lions, they of the three* NCAA tournament appearances in their entire Big Ten history, each winter. And if you are, in most years you’re clinging to little more than optimism as March approaches and Penn State’s resume seems to be a win or two or five short (*-yes, it would be four if not for COVID-19 … but that’s still not a great number).

But after a bumpy start this fall, and during a time of year when the Nittany Lions’ football counterparts have done very little to inspire optimism of their own, Micah Shrewsberry and his first Penn State team are, without a lot of fanfare or flash, rewarding that loyal-to-a-fault section of the fanbase with some reasons to be optimistic about the near future – and maybe even the present, too.

Heading into Sunday’s visit to No. 16 Ohio State, the Nittany Lions had won three of their last four games after a 22-day break that was a combination of finals and COVID cancellations. The only loss in that stretch came at home to No. 3 Purdue in a game in which the Nittany Lions played one of the best teams in the country to a near standstill for all but the final minutes of each half. The Lions have climbed back to 3-3 in conference play, 8-6 overall, and are suddenly a team that must be taken seriously by anyone in the league.

And, at the risk of damning a tough, hard-working group of players with faint praise, they are doing so with one of the least talented teams in the conference. That part is opinion. What’s fact is that Penn State is the Big Ten’s worst offensive program, averaging a league-low 67.2 points per game, or 19 points per game fewer than Iowa’s Big Ten-leading average. The offense during that stretch has been some occasional flashes of shooting from Seth Lundy, some aggressive frontcourt play from John Harrar and Greg Lee, and a whole bunch of Jalen Pickett. It isn’t the prettiest halfcourt ball you’ll see, and no one will accuse the Nittany Lions of trying to fly out in transition, but it’s been largely effective against a group of similarly middle-of-the-pack teams, mostly because of what Penn State is doing at the other end of the floor.

In the last four games, the Nittany Lions have held their four opponents to an average of 14.3 points below their respective season per-game averages. Now, some of that margin is due to those season totals getting padded against lower-level competition, and a five-to-six-league game sample size is probably not enough to draw serious conclusions. But it’s how Penn State is playing defense that is worth exploring, and perhaps the main reason for the present or future optimism mentioned above.

Plainly, the Nittany Lions are defending their faces off. But it isn’t a dynamic, momentum-shifting defense. The opposite, in fact. Penn State is last in the conference in blocks per game and second-to-last in steals per game. The Nittany Lions aren’t turning opponents over. They’re not full-court pressing. They’re simply playing sound, disciplined, team defense, which might be the toughest thing to get 19-22-year-olds to do.

“We’re safe,” Shrewsberry said after the Rutgers game, when Penn State held a team that had put up 93 points against Nebraska three days earlier, and scored 43 in the second half at Maryland four days later, to 34% shooting. “We’re solid. We’re going to be in position every single time.”

On one hand, this sort of defensive savvy should be expected from one of the oldest and most experienced teams in college basketball, an interesting mix of transfers from around the nation and some veteran returning players. Penn State has no true freshman on the roster, let alone in the rotation. On the other hand, most of those guys hadn’t played together before this season, and none of them had played for Shrewsberry before.

And that, right there, is the reason for optimism. If Shrewsberry can get an assortment of players, none of whom were sought-after recruits, to play team defense like this in just a few months, think of what he might be able to do with sought-after recruits – of which Penn State already has a few signed – over the course of multiple seasons. And think of what might happen when the Nittany Lions get some offensive firepower to go along with this type of defense?

Rather than comparing Shrewsberry’s far-from-completed rookie season to the nine Patrick Chambers-led seasons prior (a subject for another column, to be sure), let us compare this recent stretch to the past season by the Penn State football team. James Franklin’s Nittany Lions roared out of the gate and were perhaps the victims of their own hot start and inflated expectations. As the year went on, 5-0 just seemed further and further away, and they couldn’t get their talented individual pieces in collective harmony.

Shrewsberry’s Nittany Lions, on the other hand, got smoked by old friend Trent Buttrick and UMass in early November, and were handled rather easily in the two December conference matchups with Ohio State and Michigan State. No one expected much from them because, well, no one usually expects much from Penn State basketball, but watching this team play above its talent level after an autumn of watching a team play below its talent level has to be a breath of fresh air for Penn State fans, even if the rest of winter doesn’t go quite like the last two weeks have.