The night after opening night
Posted by kj on Thursday, January 3rd, 2008
Ohio State-Illinois Recap
Ohio State earns a key win in their first conference game, beating Illinois in Champaign 74-58. Jamar Butler put up a career high 32 points on just 17 FG attempts and threw in 6 assists to boot. So he was directly involved in roughly 44 of the Buckeyes’ 74 points. For a young team like Ohio State, having a senior point guard who can score and handle the ball efficiently is going to be a major asset in conference play.
Ohio State played their 2-3 zone almost exclusively, taking advantage of Illinois’ lack of perimeter shooting. The Illini shot just 4 of 21 (19.0%) from 3-point range. I thought they were actually pretty effective creating quality shots in the paint against the zone given the lack of a consistent 3-point threat. They shot a decent percentage (19-38) on 2-pointers. But you can’t go all night working so hard to create good shots. Against a zone, you have to pick up some easy points on open 3-point looks. Hard to believe the one-time epitome of the perimeter-oriented team now struggles so mightily outside the arc.
A Voice from Big Ten Conference Seasons Past
TAFKATBTW weighs in on the Big Ten conference race. You have to wade through his prognostications on the ACC and Big East first, though. And you only get his views on the three teams at the top of the projected Big Ten standings. Hence the “Formerly” in The Artist Formerly Known as the Big Ten Wonk. Nevertheless, his insights are always enlightening. He concurs with this blog in noting the great potential our Spartans now exhibit having reduced their turnover rate. He nonconcurs regarding the Hoosiers; his assertion is that Eric Gordon makes them MORE consistent because he’s such a potent scoring option in tight road games.
Filed in basketball, big ten, links3 responses so far
3 Responses to “The night after opening night”
Spartalyticalon 04 Jan 2008 at 9:55 am 1Interesting that Big Ten home teams are winless so far this week. Of course, the matchups haven’t quite been even. State opens up against Minnesota Sautrday night, kicking off its league play at home for the first time in like five years. We open with the first two at home, which, amazingly, hasn’t happened since the mid 1980s. Crazy. I like the way our conference schedule sets up. Easy up front and tough on the back end, which should provide good preparation for March.
spartanbloggeron 04 Jan 2008 at 12:26 pm 2The only thing that worries me about the way the schedule sets up is a scenario where there are 2-3 teams with 4-5 losses vying for the last #1 seed and we get bumped down because we lost a couple games at the end of the regular season.
On balance, though, I’ll take it.
Spartalyticalon 04 Jan 2008 at 1:08 pm 3You can take this in different directions, but of the big three teams in the B10 only Indiana plays the other two all four times, since Wisconsin won’t travel to East Lansing.
Michigan is the only team to have both of its skips against two of these three.