Well, I officially won my bet with myself to come up with the worst possible article title of the year. There have been some potential bad "Wall" forced puns, but SI beat me to the punch. Even a brief moment where "USC goes OJ (allegedly) on basketball program, slicing postseason hopes" seemed like a possibilty. Yes. Tempting indeed. In the end, seriously, what's better than a forced catch phrase from a 27 year old movie?? Mission accomplished.
But enough about me. Actually, more about me. How many of the so-called experts were touting Evan Turner as their preseason POY? That's right, no one but the beloved Manic. After last night's 33 point, 9 rebound performance on the road in a win over Purdue, it's time to make some room on the ET bandwagon. He's a legitimate challenger to John Wall and he's doing it with less around him.
One other benefit: it's become super trendy of late to increase the value of a player when his team flounders while they are injured. With the proliferation of sports talk you hear it all the time. Garnett goes down and the C's go 3-4 and he's suddenly more of an MVP candidate. (by that logic I'd like to nominate Me-Mac of the Houston Rockets LVP). I never agreed with the logic but if there was ever a case for it to be employed, this is it.
Without Turner the Buckeyes looked like a bubble team at best. With him? As I predicted before the season they are right with Michigan St.and Purdue in the race for the Big Ten title and a top two seed in March (though I admittedly fanned on Wisconsin preseason, they are in the mix too)
The Buckeyes are going to surge in the polls and are a team to be reckoned with. They remind me a ton of Syracuse; dynamic POY-caliber wings (Johnson & Turner), a lights-out spot up shooter (Routins & Diebler), good secondary scorer/ defenders (Jardine & Lighty) a bruiser inside to do the dirty work (Onawaku & Lauderdale) and steady ballhandling and decent benches. Both teams are built for March.
I'm not sure Turner can make up the gap the John Wall Hurricane has blown out to, but a few more games like last night's and he'll be pretty tough to ignore.
In the meantime, enjoy the nation's most versatile player and I'll work on some good headlines...(thinking something with"Ike" need some help on this one...)
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