by Jeff Showalter
With football season ending and IU’s beleaguered program on a season ending collapse, it’s hard to get to excited about winter in Indiana. Last night made me believe basketball season isn’t a complete waste as I flipped back and forth between a great college basketball game and a really good basketball team.
Purdue and Ohio State played their second “knock down drag out” last night. Purdue went up big, and held on thru a desperate Buckeye rally to hold on after John Diebler’s 3 pointer clanged off the back iron. Both teams are pretty good, but completely different in composition. Purdue is really balanced, with 3 juniors in Johnson, Hummel and Moore that can go for 20 plus any night. OSU runs their whole offense thru Evan Turner and he runs pick and roll or a 1-4 spread and finds his own shot or passes out of the double team for open looks from Diebler or David Lighty. Both teams are so different, but in a lot of ways the same. Both play an aggressive, physical defense. Purdue plays mostly man-to-man while OSU mixes it up with a zone, a zone trap and man-to-man. Both are tenacious rebounding teams from multiple positons on the floor. Turner leads the Big 10 in rebounding from a guard position. Turner is the real deal and is going to make a lot of money next year in the NBA.
What made this game great was that you wanted to see more. The teams have played twice with both teams winning on the oppositions floor. In a way it is like a really good NBA playoff series expecting both teams to win on either court. I’d watch a best of seven between these two teams. It had the feel of the great match ups of the “good old days”. IU/PU, Michigan/Illinois, IU/OSU were all rivalries in the late 80′s that were wars. Battles of great athletes that were coached well and played hard. We can only hope they have one more game at the Big 10 Tourney here in Indy. Hell a fourth game at Lucas Oil would be ok for me.
At commercials and halftime, I flipped to watch Butler continue on their undefeated Horizon League run. The game wasn’t close after the first 15 minutes, but Butler is still fun to watch. They aren’t the Butler teams of the past few years. They make a lot of mistakes with the ball and they don’t shoot it as well as teams past; (Gordon-plesae quit floating on your jumper. There is a reason your percentage has gone from 45% last year to 30% this year from behind the arc) but this team plays just as hard as Purdue and OSU. I still don’t know if Butler can make a run in the NCAA’s but if they can get a 4 or 5 seed and luck into playing a 12 and 13 in the first two rounds, this team can spring board the confidence to a final eight.
Either way, it was a good night for college hoops.
