With Jared Sullinger having an off night going just 4/14 from the floor, Ohio State rode Deshaun Thomas and his career-high 31 points and 12 rebounds to a 78-59 victory over Loyola at the CONSOL Energy Center in Pittsburgh.
Thomas reached his personal-best for points with over five minutes left in the game, but with the Buckeyes up by 18, Matta emptied the bench shortly thereafter. Make no mistake, this tournament will be Thomas' national coming out party, so let's cherish what we have for this run because there's a more than decent chance that he'll be playing in the NBA next year.
Thad Matta's crew advances to play Gonzaga on Saturday around 2:45pm, but tonight, we party.
Comments
Poor shooting outside of D.T. 18 turnovers. Sloppy. Gotta have more than one guy show up on Saturday.
Extremely sloppy. They better step it up on Saturday or we could be going home early
Eh, my philosophy is that this is the NCAA tournament and even the 15 seeds are decent 20+ win teams. Just win, baby.
We're not going home Saturday. Put it on my name!
October 20th: National Kenneth Guiton Day
Bingo. I have a feeling we're going to ride Deshaun all tournament long. There's nothing wrong with that. Alot of teams have won national titles riding a scorer all the way. However, if Thomas has a night a-la Willie Buford vs. Kentucky last year, that means we're pretty much toast.
October 20th: National Kenneth Guiton Day
2:45 approx. tip time on Saturday---->note to self: read the whole post/article above.
The good news is that we shot 80.8% from the line tonight. That's pretty darn good for this team, especially. Right now it's survive and advance, and there's nothing beyond that.
Go bucks.
Yep. Its an often used cliche, but this tournament truly needs to be taken one game at a time or you're done. And those games need to be taken 4-minute increments at a time.
October 20th: National Kenneth Guiton Day
Not a very encouraging start. Same problems as all year. Poor shooting and too many turnovers. Not enough team basketball. I don't see this team going very far. One man show (Thomas) will not be enough, IMO.
Just wondering how many shots Buford would need to get to 31 points...36? Thomas nets a career high on 22 shots, not bad at all.
There's the Ohio State basketball fan base I know!
For the record: Buford scored 25 points on only 14 baskets against Michigan State one and a half weeks ago, "not bad at all." If you're going to express your irrational hate towards a college student younger than you (presumably, I could be wrong as I have no way of knowing your age), at least come up with some more accurate material.
October 20th: National Kenneth Guiton Day
How is asking a question hate? It's not even a "hateful" question. Geez.
It's ok that sullinger struggled as long as they get 45-50 points out of sully, buford, and thomas they will be fine. One can struggle one can be ok and be great. The key is though that they can't all struggle. Of course with the bench and craft's 6-10 thrown in.
With your math, that's about 60 points a game? Not going to get it done.
Each game plays out differently and all the teams in the tournament are at least "good" teams. So why, do alot of posters here think the Bucks should be blowing out every team they play? This might very well have been a blowout if Sully had a typical game (he seemed to get mugged quite a few times with no calls) and Craft wasn't called for a couple of "touch" fouls... requiring him to sit.
The outcome was really never in doubt. This was a good solid win. Gonzaga will be much tougher...
The poor shooting by everyone not named DeShaun, the shot selection for large portions of the game, the high amount of turnovers and fouls, and some easy baskets caused by mis-communications and bad rotations are all cause for concern. This wasn't the team we saw for the majority of the big ten tournament.