Our Honor Defend

The men’s and women’s basketball teams began their Valentine’s Day with stiff road tests.  The women had just secured their 6th straight Big Ten championship, an unprecedented accomplishment in Big Ten shooty ladyhoops lore, with a thumping of Purdue earlier this week in Columbus.  They faced a road test against the Gophers with the chance of securing the conference crown outright.  Simultaneously, the Buckeyes visited Champaign to play the Illini, arguably the hottest team in the Big Ten at the moment.  The ladies had the tougher go-around with a pesky Minnesota team before putting the game away midway through the second stanza.  Meanwhile, Evan Turner’s Buckeyes barged into Illinois’ home and essentially took the belt sander to the Illini on national televsion.  The end-result? A greaty day for shooty hoops.

Unfortunately I was not able to watch the women’s game.  I know the sport doesn’t have much draw, but that doesn’t make winning their 6th straight conference championship outright any less significant.  Consider: the Big Ten began sponsoring shooty ladyhoops in 1982-1983.  Ohio State started with 5 straight conference championships from 1983 to 1987, the longest stretch before the current run of 6 straight from the Buckeyes.  All told, the women’s basketball program at Ohio State accounts for 13 Big Ten titles in 28 seasons of shooty ladyhoops¹. That’s impressive. You know who has not won any championships in the sport? Michigan.

It’s unfortunate that, for even this observer, this championships have a bit of a “so what?” feel to them. It seems that shooty ladyhoops is orchestrated in such a way as to ensure that either Tennessee or Connecticut win the national championship. This year, Connecticut is undefeated… again. I have lingering questions about this team as March approaches. For now, I’ll appreciate the victory.

Meanwhile, the Buckeyes mauled Illinois in their own home to stay in the logjam at the top of the Big Ten regular season championship race.  The Buckeyes began the game in the 1-3-1 zone, harassing the 4th best 3pt shooting team in the Big Ten.  Illinois’ offense adjusted in stretches during the game, finding position in the paint for Tisdale and Davis, who each had 8 points and combined for 15 rebounds this game.  Nevertheless, awful shooting from Illinois doomed them from the start.  They were 4/24 from 3 this game and shot 23/67 (34.3%) from the field as well.  Nobody on Illinois’ team finished in double digits.  However, those stats tell a partial story of just how awful the Illini’s shooting was.  One of those 4 threes came in garbage time.  Further, if you can somehow sample out the inside position points, which really constituted the core of the Illini’s feeble offense this game, this number may look demonstrably worse.  To quickly visualize this: if you sample out Tisdale and Davis, the Illini shot 29% from the floor.  The Illini missed almost everything from 10 feet out, it seemed, which really crippled them when they were able to even make smart decisions handling the ball and finding the open man.

By contrast, the Buckeyes offense was red hot in this game and, surprisingly, not all of it came from Evan Turner.  The ballyhooed junior do-it-all from the suburban Chicago area finished 7/14 from the field and put together a 16pt, 11reb and 8ast effort that will buttress his Naismith candidacy.  However, he struggled with his shot throughout the first half while the Buckeyes put together a huge cushion between them and the Illini.  David Lighty and Jon Diebler were the heroes of this game.  Turner was getting rebounds and setting up his teammates while he struggled with his own shot.  To compensate, Lighty and Diebler had probably their best games of this season.  Lighty finished with 17 points off of 6/8 shooting, including 3/5 from 3.  Diebler sunk daggers in the hearts of the Illini fans from deep, going 6/11 behind the arc (the only field goals he attempted) and finishing with 18 points.  Combine that effort with a good showing from Lauderdale, who got his three field goals on ball screens, dunks (9 points overall) and the poor shooting from the Illini and you’ll see why we were all Witnesses… to a Valentine’s Day Massacre.

Great effort all-around from the Buckeyes, underscoring the possibility that the Buckeyes, who have won 9 of 10, might be en route to peaking at exactly the right time.  Purdue comes to town on Wednesday… so show up.

1. If you want to split hairs and use the total number of Big Ten championships allocated over the 28 years, this clip drops to 33 percent because of the handful of shared championships. [↩]