What We Learned From ... Purdue-Oklahoma

2008-12-01T09:04:45-05:00

2008-11-28T20:48:24-05:00

2008-12-01T09:04:45-05:00

shaggydan

129

9 I agree with the idea that there is no lock on these awards anymore. The level of talent in College Hoops has gotten to be so high that it starts to be a matter of who gets hot when, and I mean that in a good way. There is no easily drawn conclusions anymore, if you want respect on this level, you have to earn it every week. 3490161

2008-11-29T22:21:45-05:00

http://img.fannation.com/upload/user_profile/image/8/thumb/pizza-_-roaches.gif 406 CT

krish

New Hartford 19

7 The entire internet is buzzing on the officiating from that game - also missed in the OK love fest was that Purdue plays Duke at home on Tuesday night - absolutely must see basketball. And then, the Boilers play Davidson in a few weeks. If they escape both those games with W's - they will have a pretty strong resume going into the B10 season. 3480893

2008-11-29T22:21:45-05:00

http://img.fannation.com/upload/user_profile/image/8/thumb/pizza-_-roaches.gif 406 CT

krish

New Hartford 19

8 The entire internet is buzzing on the officiating from that game - also missed in the OK love fest was that Purdue plays Duke at home on Tuesday night - absolutely must see basketball. And then, the Boilers play Davidson in a few weeks. If they escape both those games with W's - they will have a pretty strong resume going into the B10 season. 3480928

2008-11-29T19:28:21-05:00

mdd

Bloomington 42109

6 Rewatch the whole game Luke, Intentional Fouls, "inadvertent whistles", the new 3-4 steps fake move to the basket is now legal, no over the back calls, one of the worst officiated most blatant one sided games I have ever watched. I hope Matt Painter is correct when he says Mike Stephens will never work another Purdue game if he has any say. 3479977

2008-11-29T14:51:49-05:00

http://img.fannation.com/upload/user_profile/image/8/thumb/pizza-_-roaches.gif 406 CT

krish

New Hartford 19

5 Yeah - did you go to OK Luke? Gimme a break - not only was Griffin Dr. Over the back - but the foul on Etwan Moore as he drove the lane in regulation was a complete no call. I've re-tivoed that 5 second span about 50 times, and the smack from behind on his arm is so so blatant that it's a crime it wasn't called and Moore wasn't at the line shooting 2. Say he makes 1 - there was 1.2 seconds left. Win to Purdue. 3478486

2008-11-29T13:33:18-05:00

wsdew

No City 620265

4 oops, sorry for the two posts, thought the first one didn't go through. 3478004

2008-11-29T13:32:47-05:00

wsdew

No City 620265

3 46-5. Do you really think that's simply "Purdue fouling too much?" Even if maybe, just maybe the 46 is justified, is the 5? Is the 9 to 1 ratio? Purdue only shot 3 free throws in regulation. 3. From a team that only attempted 10 more threes than the team that shot 40+ in regulation. From the team that had plenty of drives and inside shots and was only outrebounded by 4. That just seems to me like an unexplainable ratio. And I understand the whole never complain about the refs mantra. But at what point does that ratio become complainable? 10 to 1? 15 to 1? 3477982

2008-11-29T13:30:10-05:00

wsdew

No City 620265

2 So you see no disparity at 46-5 that says anything other than Purdue fouls a lot? Does OU play perfect defense and never foul? The 46 might, might be fair. But the 5? Wow. How many times do you think there has been that disparity between two very good teams ranked in the top 15? Never? 3477976

2008-11-29T01:02:55-05:00

JfwSooner

Shawnee 577898

1 I appreciate some Sooner LOVE... Capel has put some character into a basketball team of a football school... Blake should average 15 rebounds for the season and nearly 25 points....it will be a great year for sooner fans. 3476088

<div class="photo_container image_right"> <div class="photo"><img src="http://img.fannation.com/upload/si_blog_post_images/oklahoma.jpg" alt="Oklahoma" width="298" height="350" /></div> <div class="photo_attributes" style="text-align:right;">Willie Warren and Oklahoma had ample reason to celebrate. AP</div> </div> NEW YORK -- Three things we learned from No. 11 Oklahoma's 87-82, overtime win over No. 10 Purdue in the finals of the NIT Season Tip-Off ... 1. The Boilermakers provided a better template for stopping Blake Griffin than any Sooners opponent has this year ... but just got too foul-happy down the stretch. The most intriguing tactical part of this duel was that Purdue, one of the country's best defensive teams, had no direct counter for Griffin, who is 6-foot-10 and 251 pounds, and was averaging 27.2 points and 18.8 rebounds entering the game. At center, the Boilermakers either had 6-10, 215-pound JaJuan Johnson, whose legs are skinnier than Griffin's forearms; or 6-9, 247-pound Nemanja Calasan, who's a slower and less graceful version of Vlade Divac. Johnson, alone, would get run over by Griffin; Calasan would get blown away. Thus, coach Matt Painter had no other option but to enlist his four-men -- either Robbie Hummel or Marcus Green -- to sag off of Griffin's older brother, Taylor, and try to limit Blake's touches as much as possible. In the first half, this was a relative success: Blake took just six shots, almost all contested, and had just three free-throw attempts, for a total of eight points. He was visibly agitated, and looked, at times, like a whiny freshman rather than a battle-tested sophomore, begging refs to bail him out of trouble rather than finding ways to get open. As Hummel said, "We were trying not to get beat by their superstar," and the Boilers weren't, as they took a 40-36 lead into the break. When Purdue was scouting the Sooners, the scariest segments of Blake Griffin video were the spins: Hummel said he remembered one in particular where Griffin took a post feed on one block, "then spun around his guy on the baseline and reverse dunked." And so their double-teams were not just double-teams, but efforts to take away Griffin's spinning option by sealing off the baseline. Said guard Chris Kramer, "We wanted to make [Griffin] come to the middle, where our help was, because he loves that baseline. Better to make him pass or shoot over us than just jam it in from the block." Forcing Griffin to go in a certain direction -- given that he was peerless in both size and athleticism -- was not as simple as merely standing in the right place. "They were just grabbing and holding me," Griffin said of the Boilers. "I've gotten that before, but they were a little more aggressive, I guess you could say." What kept Purdue in the game early sunk them in the end, though: What passed, in the refs' eyes, as legal aggression in the first half was not allowed in the second, and while Griffin's touches were still limited in the final 25 minutes -- he was just 2-of-7 from the field in that stretch -- he got the foul line 10 more times. The game finished with a free-throw attempt disparity of 46-to-5 in Oklahoma's favor. Griffin hit two free throws with 52.2 seconds left in regulation to tie the game at 74-74, sending it to overtime, where the Sooners pulled away. 2. Super-frosh Willie Warren saved the day. Blake Griffin finished with 18 points and 21 boards. Taylor, the beneficiary of Purdue's non-stop double-teams on his brother, had 19 points and eight rebounds. But there's no chance the Sooners win this game without Warren's combination of size and speed on the perimeter. The Purdue Way is to play pressure-man defense on the perimeter, flustering opposing guards into making turnovers or taking uncomfortable jumpers late in the shot clock. This usually works -- and it's how the Boilers will win the Big Ten this year -- but not against Warren, who got by Kramer, the league's defensive player of the year, and E'Twaun Moore, a preseason all-conference guard with ease on Friday. Once he had penetrated the first layer of the Purdue D, Warren used his 6-4, 207-poind frame to either score in traffic or get to the free-throw line, where he took just as many attempts as Griffin (13) and made 11, to finish with 22 points. Warren's exhibition was oddly reminiscent of Memphis' Derrick Rose blowing up UCLA's Darren Collison in last year's Final Four -- a powerful guard just having his way with an opponent who, under normal circumstances, would be a standout defender. And it turned out that Griffin had been filling his head with Rose chatter all month: "I keep telling [Warren], look at what Derrick Rose did last year," Griffin said. "[Rose] was a very unselfish player, but at the same time he could go score whenever he wanted. I feel like that's what Willie brings to our team." 3. There's no lock on the Wooden and Naismith Awards anymore. Conventional wisdom was that North Carolina's Tyler Hansbrough would pull off a repeat Wooden/Naismith sweep as a senior, but he's off to a slow start with a shin injury, and honestly: On such a loaded Tar Heels team, is there any way he'll be able to put up numbers like Griffin's? Blake's stats have been Beasleyian thus far; his lowest rebound total through six games is 15 (15!) and he's already had monster nights against two ranked teams (Davidson and Purdue). Michael Beasley was hurt in player-of-the year voting because he played on a team that barely made the NCAA tournament. Oklahoma is likely to stay in the top 15 all year long, and earn a top-four seed ... which means Mr. Griffin might just be the favorite for the hardware. 27481

Luke Winn

New York 4563