Men's Basketball
Buckeye Team Defense and Team Speed Takes Them to NCAA Title Game
By John Porentas

In the second-to-last game of the season it finally became apparent that we all had it wrong about the Buckeyes.

For a full season the talk has been about Greg Oden, Greg Oden and Mike Conley, The Thad Five, and lately, Ron Lewis. Talk is cheap, and so was the analysis all season, because it wasn't worth a darn.

OSU's (35-3) performance against Georgetown (30-7) left no doubt that the real magic of this year's magical OSU basketball team is not a star or stars, but team. In the Buckeye 67-60 Final Four win over the Hoyas, all nine players who played did what they had to do, even when one of their numbered faltered.

Oden went to the bench with his second foul just two minutes and 39 seconds into the game and stayed there until the half was over. In short, he just wasn't much help in the first half, and Georgetown's talented 7-2 Roy Hibert was still on the floor. It looked very bad for the Buckeyes. It was also the perfect situation for us all to learn what the Buckeyes are about.

Oden's absence changed the way the Buckeyes played, but play on is what they did and left the floor at the half with what most would have called a shocking 27-23 halftime lead. Shocking to everyone, that is, except the Buckeyes.

"I guess people have to know that by now, just watching the last three games, Greg's been in foul trouble and we still come out with a victory, so there's got to be something on the team that's going out there," said OSU forward David Lighty.

"We have a team. Everybody comes in and contributes to our win."

Nobody gave the Buckeyes a chance to slow down Georgetown's Jeff Green. The common knowledge was that the Buckeyes just didn't have anyone who could match up with the Big East Player of the Year. Actually, that was true, but OSU limited Green to just nine points and a total of five field goal attempts. After the game Green was absolutely sure how the Buckeyes were able to bottle him up.

"They played great defense," explained Green.

"When you have your teammate's back and they help you out whatever position you're in, that's what they did today. All five teammates, whenever they came in, had each other's back. That's what made it hard for us to throw it down to Roy Hibert or for myself or DaJuan (Summers). I think you credit that to DaJuan shooting one-for-10," said Green.

"They played great help-side defense with the other guy helping on the weak side. It made it hard for my teammates to throw it down or find me. You have got to credit their defense. They played together," Green said.

OSU's defenders helped each other the entire game and at times made the normally machine-like efficient Georgetown offense look like a machine in dire need of a tune up. The Hoyas committed 14 turnovers, nine in the first half, in the face of a hustling, scraping OSU defense that knew what it had to do, then did it. It was much the same way in every other phase of the game.

OSU Head Coach Thad Matta had made it clear to his team that one particular phase of the game would probably determine the outcome, a phase that on paper the bigger Hoyas had a decided advantage.

"Number one was rebound the basketball," said Matta.

"I told the guys before the game that if we win the rebounding war we're going to win the basketball game," Matta said.

Oden played just 20 minutes against Georgetown, but the Buckeyes outrebounded the Hoyas 37-30. Oden had nine, Ivan Harris seven, Mike Conley and Ron Lewis five each, Othello Hunter four and David Lighty and Matt Terwilliger three each. Everybody hit the glass, and everybody contributed. A team effort.

"They said they needed a lot of rebounds out of me this game so I crashed the boards," said Harris matter-of-factly in the OSU locker room after the game.

It was his job, so he did it. He team needed it.

Offensively, the Buckeyes didn't look at one-on-one matchups when formulating a game plan, they looked at the overall team, and found an aspect of their team that was better than that same aspect of the Georgetown team, team speed.

"We knew we could run on them," said Ron Lewis.

"That was our main thing. With our transition game going in the second half you know they were tired where they couldn't get back because they were so big. It played into our hands the whole way," Lewis said.

In a game that didn't turn out to be a great one for the stars, the OSU team was just too much to overcome. When they needed Mike Conley, he was there, slashing his way to a team-high 15 points. Oden got untracked in the second half and ended the game with 13 points to go with his seven rebounds, all of his scoring and rebounding coming after the intermission. Ivan Harris and David Lighty combined for 14 points, 10 rebounds and three steals in a combined 40 minutes of play as OSU's four-man. Their combined numbers compared favorably to those of Green.

OSU led most of the way, but the Hoyas made a couple of runs at the Buckeyes and actually led once in the second half and tied the game once mostly behind the scoring of Hibert and Jonathan Wallace who each had a game-high 19 points. It didn't matter, because the OSU team always had an answer and won going away.

"We fought back, but every time we punched they punched back a little bit harder in the end," said Hibert.

"I give the props to them."

Ohio State will meet Florida in the national championship game on Monday.

Box Score

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