Buckeyes Show No Love for Illinois on Valentine’s Day

When Jon Diebler is shooting well, the Buckeyes are pretty close to unbeatable.  With Evan Turner, William Buford and David Lighty playing an athletic style of ball diving to the hole the Buckeyes are good.  Combine that with an outside shooter that can bomb and the Buckeyes are great.  And we saw that Buckeyes team on Sunday.  Diebler was 6-11 from the field, and guess what he was from three point land?  That’s right.  6-11.  With 16:55 to go in the first half, the Buckeyes took a lead that they would never relinquish.  To think that they did it on Illinois’ home court too is pretty impressive.

Of course the Buckeyes’ offense wasn’t the whole story.  A look at the box score might lead you to think Illinois just had a really bad game, offensively.  While that may be partially true, the Buckeyes defense was playing at a different speed.  They were playing the 1-3-1 zone and bouncing all over the court.  They were trapping guards, closing out on shooters, collapsing into the lane, and jumping pass lanes.  The result was that they held Illinois to 34.3% shooting from the field including 16.7% from three.  The Illini shot 4 for 24 from three.  A college team doesn’t do that without an impressive defense getting in their faces and making life difficult from the field.

That is one of the keys to the 1-3-1 zone for the Buckeyes.  They have to recognize whether the opposing team is hitting threes early.  The zone has a tendency to give up some three point shots.  If the other team is bombing, then the Bucks have to go back to a man defense.  They didn’t have to play much man yesterday in Illinois.

Evan Turner was great as usual.  He was two assists shy of a triple double.  It feels as if I have written that exact sentence a lot of times this season.  Turner finished with 16 points, 8 assists, and 11 rebounds.  Diebler  had 18 points as I mentioned before, all on threes.  David Lighty added 17 points and William Buford added 5.

Most importantly, the Buckeyes are atop the Big Ten standings with Michigan State.  But this is a GIANT week for the Buckeyes.  On Wednesday Ohio State hosts 6th ranked Purdue, who is coming off their own blowout of 23 points over Iowa.  Purdue is sitting just below Ohio State with a 9-3 record in the Big Ten.  Then on Sunday, if the Buckeyes are lucky enough to get past Purdue, they travel to Michigan State to face off against the 10th ranked Spartans.

I know a lot of people blow off the college basketball regular season because of March Madness, but the race for the Big Ten Championship is shaping up to be an epic battle against some really solid teams.