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As Ohio State honors seniors vs Nebraska, Bruce Thornton closing out third impactful season
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- As Ohio State honors seniors vs Nebraska, Bruce Thornton closing out third impactful season
Seven members of the Ohio State men's basketball program will be honored before Tuesday night's game against Nebraska. Before the home finale, the Buckeyes will recognize two players, two managers, an equipment manager, a student trainer and a social media manager prior to their final games inside Value City Arena.
There will assuredly be other players suiting up for the Buckeyes with remaining eligibility who, perhaps unknowingly, will also be playing their final home games. The transfer portal era of college basketball, in which players freely move from roster to roster and opportunities and can monetize name, image and likeness rights, make it a near-certainty that not every player who can return to Ohio State in 2025-26 will do so.
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Ohio State still has its most important basketball of the year to play. Whenever the season ends, the biggest roster question for a second straight season will revolve around guard, captain and leading scorer Bruce Thornton. A three-time captain, two-time leading scorer and program cornerstone, Thornton has an opportunity to plaster his name all over the Ohio State record books should he return for a fourth year. In 2022, junior forward E.J. Liddell participated in senior day before entering the NBA draft.
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Before the season started, coach Jake Diebler said he had a talk with Thornton about what the future might hold and the two discussed a key goal for the 6-foot-2, 215-pound guard.
"Both of ours goal for him is to play his way into the NBA," Diebler said Monday. "I hope that by the end of the season he will have done enough to do that. We want that for him, but the one thing about him and one thing that makes him such a good player is he focuses on the here and now and he goes hard every single day he steps between the lines.
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"He takes care of himself at a high level. That's where the focus has been, but make no mistake, we're aligned in what our goals were for him personally going into this season. I think he's taken a step forward from where he was last year in that regard."
Ohio State Buckeyes guard Bruce Thornton (2) gathers the team in a huddle prior to the NCAA men's basketball game against the Washington Huskies at Value City Arena in Columbus on Feb. 13, 2025. Ohio State won 93-69.
In three years, Thornton has missed one game. A migraine forced him out of the lineup for last year's Feb. 29 game against, ironically, Nebraska. When the Buckeyes tip against the Cornhuskers , it will mark the 100th game – all starts – for Thornton. This year, he's averaging a career-high 17.4 points and 35.8 minutes per game. His 43.9% 3-point percentage is also a career-best, as is his offensive rating of 130.5 at KenPom.com.
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On Ohio State's all-time lists, Thornton is 25th in scoring (1,425), 15 assists away from tying for 10th (Larry Bolden, 1974-77, dished out 401 helpers) and seventh in made 3-pointers (154). With one more season, William Buford's record of 137 starts could be in jeopardy. So could Dennis Hopson's all-time scoring mark of 2,096 points.
At his rate of 17.4 points per game this season, Thornton would need 39 more games to eclipse Hopson. When it comes to legacy, though, Thornton has said since the day he committed to Ohio State that there's one thing he wants to be known for.
"When you win, they remember you," he said when he committed sight-unseen to the program in November 2020.
Thornton is yet to play in an NCAA Tournament game. When coach Chris Holtmann was fired midseason last year, Thornton's mother was besieged by phone calls from schools hoping he would enter the transfer portal. He didn't, and once the season closed Thornton said he made a "big-time decision" to stay because of loyalty as well as a belief that Ohio State was the best place for him to pursue his goals .
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Sam Vecenie, senior NBA draft writer for The Athletic, did not include Thornton among the top 100 draft prospects for 2025 in an update published Feb. 27 but said that doesn't mean the Buckeye isn't a potential future pro.
"If he was to enter the draft this year, I would guess that he would get a two-way contract," Vecenie said. "A two-way contract in the NBA is $600,000, ballpark. Based off of current market values I feel quite confident that somebody out there will offer him a million dollars a year to play college basketball.
"With that being said, it probably makes more sense for Bruce to be a college basketball player next year. The ultimately reality here is he's more valuable in the college basketball ecosystem than he is within the NBA ecosystem, both from a financial and a play perspective."
Multiple sources have told The Dispatch that at $600,000 Thornton would be taking a pay cut from his current earnings.
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Before the season began, Thornton thought back to his statements upon committing to the Buckeyes. The notion of only winners being remembered was something the junior said he thought of on his own, and after two seasons of more losing than he'd hoped for there was a belief that better things were ahead.
"When I first got here, I didn't know my journey would be like this," he said then. "It's all good, though. I just put my faith in God and know every day is a new day. I can't dwell too much on the past because it's already in the past. I try to stay exactly where my feet are at and just pray and manifest that we're going to be in the position where they're going to remember me playing at Ohio State.
"They're going to remember this team, making a deep run and winning a national championship."
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This article originally appeared on The Columbus Dispatch: Will captain Bruce Thornton have a senior day at Ohio State?
