Two of the three Big Ten teams in action Saturday were sent into the offseason while the other continued its uninspiring, solipsistic drift into next week’s Sweet Sixteen. While the winning team will continue to collect praise for its comeback, the memory of the losing efforts will recede into the good night with little more mention. Obviously, winning deserves the hottest glare, but let’s not be among those blinded by it.
Sometimes winning performances, though unimpeachable from a bottom line standpoint, are much less deserving of praise, admiration, and respect than the losing ones. Sometimes the winning team is the infinitely less impressive one. Nowhere is this conclusion more apt than when considering yesterday’s Buckeye overtime dodge of Xavier and the valiant, but ultimately failed efforts of Michigan State and Indiana. That Ohio State needed St. Patrick’s dumb luck (and a Ron Lewis moonball) to beat a team, though well coached, which was every bit a nine seed while the Spartans and Hoosiers stretched vaunted and deserving one and two seeds respectively is only part of the story. More germane is how these teams acquitted themselves as combatants, how they represented their respective programs and the Big Ten, how they played the game, process rather than results.
Own
The losing efforts of the Spartans and Hoosiers were, from a basketball standpoint, of the edifying, faith building variety for fans of their respective programs and the conference. Well reasoned wariness and skepticism about Kelvin Sampson’s integrity will remain, but his team’s toughness in the final stretch against UCLA was hard not to admire.
Sampson’s inherited roster this year was, except for D.J. White, an uproven and completely lopsided one thanks to Mike Davis. That he got them as far as he did was the result of his installation of the toughness and defense displayed last night. Those elements and some spirited offense from the Hoosier corps of guards put a scare into a team that was far deeper and more talented.
If Sampson is able to instill the same night in night out intensity, guts, and cohesion in his crop of uber talented newcomers next season, the basketball side of the equation in Bloomington is certainly not going to be as derelict as his reputation as a recruiter.
A less equivocal endorsement can be extended to Tom Izzo’s Spartans whose loss against what appears to be the best combination of talent and effort remaining in this year’s brackets was hard fought and redolent of why his program is not only among the nation’s most successful but the most respected. Izzo team’s, even the ones as fresh cheeked as this year’s, play well taught, high level, no quit basketball.
Despite having only two reliable scorers in Hoopraker Co-Big Ten Player of the Year Drew Neitzel and future All-American freshman Raymar Morgan, the Spartans gave Roy Williams’ latest bushel of studs a tough game until the five minute mark. The absence of Ibok exacerbated the frontcourt foul trouble and Suton’s six point effort wasn’t enough. But the tough showing by the Spartans will pay huge dividends for next season.
For those interested in bandwagon jumping it’s advisable to jump on the Spartan one now. They have everybody back and are adding serious offense and all-around athleticism with new arrivals Durrell Summers, Chris Allen, and Kalin Lucas.
Disown
The Ohio State team on national display yesterday is, of course, no surprise to anyone who has been watching with even modest objectivity since November. It is a team christened last summer by the recruiting services, Sonny Vaccaro hypist pimps, and media mouthpieces as a peerless, instant impact, indeed inevitable group of athletes. And as anyone who has been witness to even a little of the AAU, elite summer camp, McDonald’s All-American, Roundball Classic elements of the modern basketball complex knows, these are athletes who have been coddled, enabled, fawned, and hip hopped into an unhealthy self-regard. And more often than not the braggart’s share of these teenage megalomaniacs end up with college coaches like the one in Columbus who are more gab than substance, coaches who lure them with more flattery than challenge, and the enablement cycle continues unchecked.
This Buckeye bucket of blue chips and its key holdovers, as evidenced all season long, fulfills many of the worst stereotypes of the aforementioned breeding system. Heavy lidded, yawning, too cool body language, lazy reliance on talent, intermittent effort, lack of offensive discipline, playing down to competition, playing to the camera, and all the while little evidence of a more than slight connection to the university or the program they are using to forward their NBA dreams, some of which are delusional at best.
All of this was on full and predictable display yesterday against Xavier. Unfortunately, that was not all. Late in the game came another and even more inexcusable, ugly insult to the fan who cares about process, whose attachment to the Big Ten is due in no small part to the integrity with which many of its teams are known to play.
Buckeye Character
Greg Oden’s flagrant, character revealing shove of Justin Cage yesterday was the tipping point for this correspondent. Though I’ve been more than dissatisfied with this season’s Buckeye basketball experience under Matta, I have been willing to withhold much of my contempt. Though they hadn’t played with any of the intensity or respect for the game that I expect from Big Ten champions, I was willing to ascribe it to youth. Certainly, they would eventually produce a heartening, redemption game I could recognize as truly great. It still hasn’t arrived, the entitled look and feel of the team persists, and yesterday the team’s hyped centerpiece enters the polarizing realm of the Laettner stomp. That it isn’t being corroborated with any momentum by the media doesn’t mean it didn’t happen.
I’m With The Losers
While the Buckeyes are now the Big Ten’s only remaining hope for this year’s top prize, I’ll throw my lot with the losers. There’s nothing wrong with a little deferred gratification and chances are the rewards will come in short order from slower, steadier, and much richer programs, both in basketball product and character, such as those in East Lansing and West Lafayette next year.
You are, in the end, what you root for. And rooting for this year’s Buckeyes with their wins matched only by their warts does a disservice to a conference with a standard of excellence that they so consistently misrepresent.
Oden’s push of Cage should’ve been two shots and the ball. Game over for the Bucks. That the refs didn’t call it and the tv hacks didn’t talk about it is ridiculous. Oden basically admitted he went off on Cage in his post game interview. It seems the refs are so mesmerized by Oden’s size or something that they miss the game going on around him. And Matta excusing it after the game is worse.
Left by max on March 18th, 2007