Taison Chatman will miss 2024-25 season after suffering season-ending knee injury

COLUMBUS — Taison Chatman’s freshman season got off to a delayed start and never really took off. Now, after more injury trouble, the Ohio State guard will have to wait a year for his sophomore season.

Chatman will miss the 2024-25 campaign after going down with a season-ending knee injury during a summer workout. This summer’s knee injury is unrelated to the meniscus issue Chatman had in the same knee last year. He completed a successful surgery this week and will begin rehabbing for his 2025-26 return.

“I’m incredibly sad for Taison that he’s going to miss the entire year,” Buckeyes head coach Jake Diebler said in a statement Wednesday. “After a tough start to his collegiate career, he worked his way back and played a role for us at the end of last season.

“He continued that development this spring and was working out really well. I was looking forward to watching him take the next step this year. But I know he’ll work hard and get back to form as soon as he can.”

Chatman missed fall camp last preseason while recovering from his aforementioned meniscus injury, which limited him during his senior year at Totino-Grace High School in Minnesota. He made his Ohio State debut Nov. 24 against Alabama in the Emerald Coast Classic.

Chatman ended up recording 17 appearances for the Buckeyes as a freshman, averaging 4.2 minutes per outing and finishing the season with 17 points to his name.

The former four-star recruit arrived at Ohio State as the highest-rated prospect in a four-man Buckeyes 2023 class that ranked eighth nationally, according to the On3 Industry Ranking. The 6-foot-4, 175-pound Chatman came in as the On3 Industry Ranking’s No. 38 overall prospect, including the No. 7 shooting guard, that recruiting cycle.

He led Totino-Grace to back-to-back Minnesota 3A state titles in 2022 and 2023, the second of which took place during his injury-hampered senior season. Chatman capped his final high school chapter with 20 points, 12 rebounds, four assists and two steals in the 2023 state title game against DeLaSalle.

But missed time in the preseason prevented Chatman from seeing the floor as early as Ohio State classmates Scotty Middleton and Devin Royal last year. After Chatman got his first playing time against Alabama, he heard his number called in three of the next four games. Except he didn’t get Big Ten minutes under his belt until January when Bruce Thornton foul trouble thrust him into action at Indiana.

Still, with Chris Holtmann at the helm, Chatman’s minutes were few and far between. Following the Indiana game, Chatman scattered a mere six minutes across three additional Big Ten games before Holtmann’s midseason firing. Once Diebler took over, originally as interim head coach, the Buckeyes’ rotation expanded, and Chatman got more usage.

In fact, over Diebler’s 11 games in charge, Chatman made nine appearances, and that’s when he scored all 17 of his points last season. Chatman carved out a small role for himself, at one point making a 3-pointer in 4-of-5 games he played in from Feb. 29 to March 23.

“I think he’s been really good in his minutes,” Diebler said of Chatman on March 25, leading up to the Buckeyes’ final NIT game, a quarterfinal loss to Georgia.

“You can see we’ve tried to give him an additional part of the rotation. And he’s earned that. He’s a good player, there’s no question about that. I feel for him because of just the choppiness of his first year. [It was] certainly out of his control. But I think we all would have liked to see what it could have looked like for him if he had a full summer, full fall.”

Diebler continued: “That stretch is so important for freshmen. It’s so important. It’s critical. It sets a tone for their kind of growth. And he’s a really, really talented player. But I think you’re seeing, too, some qualities from him — from a standpoint of like, he’s stayed ready, he’s gone in, and he’s had some really good moments. And certainly some of that is his talent, but it also speaks to who he is.”

Unfortunately for Chatman, he won’t get a full summer or a full fall this year, either. His choppy start to his Ohio State career is continuing because of another knee injury.