Sunday Column: For The First Time In A Long Time, The Focus Is On The NOW For Penn State Basketball
“Our main business is not to see what lies dimly at a distance, but to do what lies clearly at hand.”
-Thomas Carlyle, 19th-century Scottish philosopher
The past is a wasteland. The future is uncertain and a lot more ominous than it was a few weeks ago.
The Penn State men’s basketball present, however, is something to be savored.
The Nittany Lions, essentially left for dead after blowing a huge second-half lead in an eventual loss to Rutgers on Feb. 26, are firmly in the NCAA Tournament field for the first time since 2011 and will play Purdue on Sunday for the Big Ten Tournament title. That’s awesome in and of itself but what’s even better is that very few teams in the country are playing better ball (at least for stretches) than the Nittany Lions are at the moment.
What we’re seeing is a run like few Penn State teams have ever experienced, and Nittany Lion fans should soak it up for all it’s worth, for a few reasons.
First, every game that Penn State plays in the NCAA Tournament could be Jalen Pickett’s last, and to say the Siena transfer has done it all for the Nittany Lions this season is like saying Jim Nantz is kinda corny. The Nittany Lions will have to fill not only the minutes and production of Pickett but also of Andrew Funk, Cam Wynter, Myles Dread and (likely, though he does have one more year of eligibility if he wants it) Seth Lundy. Perhaps the 2023-24 team, which looks as though it will be led by electric point guard Kanye Clary, will be able to forge the same kind of chemistry these veterans have shown down the stretch, but it’s looking like a rebuilding season no matter how you slice it or what the transfer portal may bring.
The reason it’s not impossible to envision that sort of chemistry among a new batch of Lions, of course, is Micah Shrewsberry, who is also the primary reason for fans’ nervousness about the future. There are some big-boy head coaching jobs open this spring, including Notre Dame and Georgetown, and though it would be a surprise to see Shrewsberry bolt after just two seasons from a team to which his son is committed to play for next year, it wouldn’t be a shocker. The Nittany Lions have never put the same sort of resources into their basketball program as their Big Ten peers, and they finally have a coach who can command those resources or quickly find another place that offers them. And whether he simply wants to use the increasingly bright spotlight to coax some more guarantees from the administration or actually is considering leaving, each win gives Shrewsberry additional leverage.
Though these are legitimate issues for a school that has historically treated the program like Jan Brady, they are tomorrow’s issues. Shrewsberry will coach this team for at least one more week, and this remarkable run will continue for at least one more week. And unless you’re wearing the bluest of blue-and-white-colored glasses, you have to acknowledge that what the Nittany Lions are doing is indeed remarkable. This team is not devoid of talent, but it was pieced together from transfers from smaller programs, from role players from previous Penn State teams, and from a promising but still very raw freshman class. The Nittany Lions, with the exception of a strong day on the boards from Kebba Njie, are getting next to nothing from their post players, and while they’ve made a ton of clutch threes, they haven’t even been shooting at the level that made them the conference’s top 3-point shooting team (in makes) and second-best team in terms of 3-point percentage, going just 23-of-64 from deep in the first three games of the tournament. And yet … they just keep defending and scrapping and finding ways to win, somehow making it look hard and easy at the same time.
This run to the tournament final in a conference that was filled with good teams but perhaps had only one great one (the Purdue team PSU faces Sunday) doesn’t guarantee that Penn State won’t run into a tough first-round matchup in the NCAAs next week and that it all ends as soon as it began. The Nittany Lions’ NCAA opponent(s) don’t really care about their future and would be wise to disregard their feeble past entirely.
Because, at present, this is a team that no one wants to play.
Leave a Comment