Young Buckeyes must grow up fast
COLUMBUS (AP) — Ohio State’s players know what others are saying about them.
About how they’re too young to be ready for a first-round NCAA tournament game Friday against experienced Siena and will get rattled by all the attention.
“We watch ESPN like everybody else does. The word gets around. Everybody’s picking Siena because they’ve got a veteran team and, well, success speaks. They’ve done it before. Everybody is going off that,” Buckeyes point guard P.J. Hill said Wednesday. “I don’t blame everybody else for going with them. They’ve done it before and [people] have seen it with their eyes. But we’re going to try to upset that.”
The eighth-seeded Buckeyes (22-10) meet ninth-seeded Siena (26-7) in the first round of the Midwest Regional at the University of Dayton — roughly an hour or so down the road from Ohio State’s campus.
Even though Ohio State has a slightly better seed, many pundits pick Siena to advance because the Buckeyes don’t have a senior on the roster — no one on the team has ever played in an NCAA tournament — and the Saints shocked fourth-seeded Vanderbilt 83-62 in the first round a year ago in Tampa, Fla.
The thinking goes that Siena, which returns all five starters from that team, won’t be scared of the spotlight’s glare. That figures to be a major advantage.
“It could be, just because they’ve been in it,” Ohio State coach Thad Matta said. “But I’ve always said, once that ball gets tossed up, you get in that arena you don’t know if you’re playing in the NCAA tournament or in a Division Nine tournament. It’s, here we go, we’ve got a job to do.”
It’s not as if the Buckeyes don’t expect to have some butterflies. In fact, they expect them.
“I’m sure the first four minutes is going to be crazy for us,” center Dallas Lauderdale said. “It’s the first four minutes of something you’ve been dreaming of as a child — you know, ‘One Shining Moment’ by Luther Vandross, all that stuff.
“But after those first four minutes, I think we’ll be fine. We’ll settle in and play like it’s another basketball game.”
Just two years ago, Ohio State advanced all the way to the national championship game before falling to Florida. That seems like a couple of ice ages ago around Columbus. Three freshmen who were the linchpins of that team left for the NBA after one season (Greg Oden, Michael Conley Jr., Daequan Cook).
Last year, Matta rebuilt a team that went 19-13 overall and 10-8 in the Big Ten, but was left off the invitation list for the NCAA tournament. So, the Buckeyes won the NIT, a success that helped persuade 7-0 freshman Kosta Koufos to leave after one season.
Matta started over again, this time building around a group of sophomores, two junior-college transfers and a couple of acclaimed freshmen. Now the Buckeyes are back in the NCAA tournament — and again facing questions that second-year star Evan Turner and 7-0 freshman center B.J. Mullens might leave early for the pros.
The only player still around from the 2007 national championship game, David Lighty, broke his foot in December and missed the remainder of the season. He is the only link across two short years to the highlights of that tournament run.
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