Column: At Big Ten Tournament, Penn State's best has become good enough

Five days ago, Penn State’s players walked off the floor in Piscataway following the latest body blow in a season full of them.

The Nittany Lions did what they seem to always do. They shortened the game, enforcing at their slow, methodical pace. They played a red-hot Rutgers team close, tying the game at 55 with two minutes left.

The result, despite those factors, was also all-too-similar. All of the right ingredients went into the oven, only to emerge as a burnt pie, charred and topped with disappointment.

Penn State lost by one point. It marked its ninth defeat by six points or fewer this year and its fifth in the final 10 games of the regular season, in which the Nittany Lions went 3-7.

“We’ve given our best more times than not, and when you lose, you know how much you gave and that’s kind of what being good’s about,” Micah Shrewsberry said.

For most of the season, maybe Penn State was unlucky. KenPom certainly thinks so, using math and data to calculate that 250 Division I teams have benefitted from more good fortune than the Nittany Lions this season. Or maybe Penn State’s best just hasn’t been good enough.

Likely, it’s a mixture of the two.

But for two nights in Indianapolis this week, the Nittany Lions’ best has been sufficient. Penn State enforced its brand of basketball on an exhausted Minnesota team that folded down the stretch. Next came, an Ohio State team — with fragile bodies and more than likely a fragile outlook, having lost three of four coming in.

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The Buckeyes held a comfortable nine-point lead with 12:21 to go. EJ Liddell was firing. Penn State transfer Jamari Wheeler was chirping his former teammates. Everything looked peachy for a Buckeye team needing a win to get back on track.

Then the Nittany Lions held Ohio State without a field goal for nearly seven minutes, coming out of that stretch with a two-point lead they never gave back.

Penn State locked up one of the best offenses in the country when it absolutely had to. On the offensive end, the Nittany Lions pick-and-rolled the Buckeyes to death. Sam Sessoms and Jalen Pickett got whatever they wanted in the paint. The Lions got a couple threes to fall, too.

This is Penn State basketball under Micah Shrewsberry. This has always been the formula. And now, after 28 games of frustration and near misses, Penn State’s best is rewarding the Nittany Lions with wins.

“You’ve got to be vulnerable a little bit to be good,” Shrewsberry said. “Like it takes these guys — there’s a lot of vulnerability for these guys to go out there every single night and just put themselves out there in front of people, trying as hard as possible, knowing that you can still lose.

“It’s easy to just quit and be like, ‘I don’t want to put myself all the way out there and do everything I can because now I have a built-in excuse, right? We get beat. Yeah, I know, but I wasn’t really trying.’ These guys are putting themselves out there and trying as hard as possible and still getting beat and [there’s] some vulnerability to it, but that makes you good at the end of the day. That makes you better at the end of the day.”

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Now, the results are starting to show.

Shrewsberry, to his immense credit, has kept this patched-up Penn State roster bought in.

It’s a roster that one year ago had no reason to know him, no reason to trust him, no reason to listen to his ideas. It’s a roster that includes five transfer additions that had never played high-major basketball.

And here they are, at the Big Ten Tournament, rewarded for their patience and persistence with a quarterfinal matchup against Purdue and Matt Painter — one of Shrewsberry’s mentors.

If a corner has indeed been turned, maybe it’s too late for a tangible reward. Maybe the Nittany Lions will run out of gas, unable to draw the necessary energy to do to Purdue what they’ve done to just about every opponent this season.

That seems like the most likely outcome. But since when has March ever been about likely outcomes?

Every win this time of year is precious regardless of what it means. And you never know what happens next.