Alot of attention is being paid to the two men who will be a center court on Saturday when Ohio State and Georgetown face off:
Greg Oden towered over college basketball from the moment he stepped on a court this season, a prodigy in high tops who could dominate, literally, with one hand. He was named a first-team all-American in his freshman season, validating the cavalcade of hype that followed him to Ohio State.
When Roy Hibbert was a freshman, he played basketball the way Bambi walked on ice, a 290-pound package of long limbs and baby fat who couldn’t do a single push-up. He can do more than 30 at once now, trimmed to an athletic 270 pounds. Hibbert has improved so much since his freshman season, “It’s almost hard to describe,” Georgetown Coach John Thompson III said.
The manner in which Oden and Hibbert became the players they are now hardly could be more divergent. But the quality they share — the ability to harness their seven feet of height with each coordinated movement — is why their matchup has become the most prominent story line of the Final Four.
Big men who rule games in the low post were thought to be extinct in college, all of them either in the NBA or wooed by the allure of shooting three-pointers. But the Oden-Hibbert showdown offers another throwback to the 1980s, when Georgetown’s Patrick Ewing and Houston’s Hakeem Olajuwon battled in the 1984 Final Four. The rarity of the meeting gives Hibbert and Oden a certain connection.
“We have a bond,” Hibbert said. “That’s special. We got to look out for each other.”
Sounds like it’ll be a good game
