There was reportedly a basketball game last night, covered by hundreds of media type persons. When asked to identify the persons involved in the game, they conferred for a while, and produced the following statement: "The basketball game tonight involved Greg Oden, and 23 other males, aged 18-24 who we were unable to identify."
I've argued that Oden has been over rated for a few months now. I watched the last 3/4 of the game last night. He looked pretty good. Not dominating, but pretty good. But what I really noticed was his final basket of the night. Florida was up 12, IIRC, and there was less than a minute to go, so FL was just looking to force OSU to run a bit of time off the clock and try not to give up a 3 pointer. The ball went in the middle to Oden who turned to the hoop and dunked it. The FL players essentially let him go. The basket pulled OSU to within 10 with 40 seconds to play. And yet Oden, who looked so tired at the end of the game, threw the ball down hard and pretty much did a chin-up on the rim. I was almost expecting him to be posing in front of the cameras after that dunk. Earth to Greg: that was a meaningless dunk. Something just didn't sit right with me and the way he threw it down.
So it turns out that FL can really shoot the ball, and OSU's game plan seemed to be "we hope Oden scores 40".
Nothing like finishing in 2,458,385th place with my bracket picks. :(
3 comments:
I can't believe I'm going to try and mix it up on the sports talk, but I think you're being a bit harsh on Oden. He dunked at the end of the first half as well, and did the same chin-up move. The commentators actually commented on it, saying that he gets eye-level to the rim pretty much every time he dunks.
He's not as big a show off as OJ Mayo, at least.
Overrated? Yes. But maybe not for the particular reasons you picked. He did look way tired last night, probably because he played for almost the entire first half without a break of any kind.
As for OSU's game plan, I'll agree with you there. But on top of the bad offense, they also made the defensive error of protecting Oden from fouls too much. The FL guys knew they weren't going to get covered by him outside, and had a huge number of 3-pointers as a result.
I actually was surprised by Oden last night, as he played better than I thought. He's only got the one dunk in his repertoire as far as I can tell. A monster, legs flailing, chin-up, dunk. All I'm saying is that it just feels really out of place at the end of a game like that.
I actually like Oden, but I really wasn't cheering for OSU. Then again, I wasn't really cheering for Florida either. I didn't want either team in the championship and thought the tourney this year was lackluster. I was so excited to actually be home to catch all the games, but I just couldn't get into it as much as I thought I would.
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