Men's Basketball
Young Buckeyes Surprisingly Efficient in Exhibition Opener
By John Porentas

The Buckeyes opened their exhibition season with an 88-59 win over Ashland College. The victory left OSU Head Coach Thad Matta a man of mixed emotions.

Matta was happy the win over the Eagles, but found himself a bit perplexed by somewhat of a scarcity of teaching points coming out of the game.

With just four returning lettermen Matta was hoping his young Buckeyes would encounter some adversity in their first outing, adversity he could teach from. He even went so far as to withhold some information in the hopes of creating some difficulties for them.

"Ashland is a team, and I didn't tell our guys this before the game because I was hoping we'd get burned in transition a little bit, but they do a good job of running transition offense," said Matta.

It didn't work out quite like Matta had hoped, which depending on how you look at it, is good news and bad. Bad because Matta didn't get the teaching point, good because, well, his team reacted well. Ashland scored just five fast break points in the game. Matta even sounded disappointed that his team didn't turn the ball over a bit more in their first outing as well.

"I really thought going into this game that we could make like a bloopers video, but for the most part I thought they did a pretty good job (of taking care of the basketball). I was surprised by that," said Matta.

The Buckeyes had a total of 15 turnovers in the game, but not many of them were bad ones. For the most part the turnovers were a result of effort, not carelessness. A good example was a pass that was intended as an allie-oop play that turned into a turnover when two Buckeyes went up for the ball instead of one. They knocked each other off the ball and the play went as a turnover, but didn't really phase Matta.

"I told them that in a game like tonight we throw the allie-oop pass and two guys try to dunk it, I like that," said Matta.

"I like guys being agressive and trying to go get it. I thought we were pretty sound. Honestly I was anticipating being a lot more careless with the ball," Matta said.

OSU's only real bad turnovers were two ball handling infractions by first-year point guard P. J. Hill..

"You take P. J.'s two palming out of there you're down to 13. We had a couple of advance passes that resulted in turnovers but we were being aggressive. I can live with those right now. I think we can eventually complete those," said Matta.

About the only thing that really concerned Matta was his team's slow start. The starting lineup of Kosta Koufos, Othello Hunter, Jamar Butler, David Lighty and Jon Diebler didn't exactly light it up in the early going. In fact, the Eagles led by a score of 7-4 about three minutes into the game. With his team trailing by two at 9-7, Matta took out Koufos, Hunter, Butler and Lighty and brought in Kyle Madsen, Matt Terwilliger, P. J. Hill and Evan Turner at the 16:06 mark. That group was able to ratchet up the defense and regain the lead for good for the Buckeyes.

"I thought we got off to a little bit of a slow start. The second group came in and really excited us, especially on defense," said Matta.

OSU led by 21 at 47-26 at the half and established their biggest lead of the night of 37 points at the 6:09 mark of the second half. The Buckeyes failed to sustain their momentum, however, and the Eagles were able to close the gap some before the final horn sounded.

"I thought we were pretty sound there in the first half. The second half we lost some intensity," Matta said.

The Buckeyes were very vanilla both offensively and defensively. According to Matta, that was the plan coming into the game.

"We didn't want to run a whole lot tonight. We may have called three or four things,," said Matta.

Despite the lack of offensive variety the Buckeyes still looked realatively sharp offensively. They shot just over 56 per cent from the field in the game while holding Ashland to 27.6 per cent shooting. Perhaps the most impressive stat was OSU's 23 assists.

"Offensively I liked the 23 assists," said Matta.

"That was one thing we really wanted to do is share the basketball."

Koufos and Hunter led all scorers with 15 points each. Twelve different Buckeyes scored in the game. Hunterand Koufos also tied for the game high in rebounds with 12 each. Butler was OSU's leading assist man with seven to go with his seven points.

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