In 2013, this was the future of basketball.
The Big Ten was a pretty good conference at the time, as it is now. Four teams in the top 10, several making the Sweet Sixteen, and Michigan as the national runners-up. It was a strong, deep conference, with any number of teams capable of making a run in March Madness. There were a number of really fun players to watch as well; Victor Oladipo at Indiana was fun as hell, Trey Burke was kicking ass at Michigan along with Tim Hardaway, Jr., and Ohio State was capable of putting on a show at both ends of the court with Deshaun Thomas and Aaron Craft.
Because of that, you might think that the 2013 Big Ten Tournament's championship game versus the 22nd-ranked Wisconsin Badgers and the No. 10 Ohio State Buckeyes would've been a nail-biter for the ages, a titanic matchup of two Big Ten powerhouses leading to a finale so explosive that it makes you rocket off your couch on every possession. And you would be wrong!
The 2013 Big Ten Men's Basketball Tournament Championship Game was the absolute worst!
While watching the 2020-21 Ohio State men's basketball team go utterly cold from the field in the last four minutes of every game for roughly the last month is infuriating, we can at least accept the premise that shooting the basketball is a good thing because if things go well it's a pretty amazing thing to watch.
But the operative word in that sentence is "if," and in 2013 Thad Matta and company weren't having any of that noise. The difference in conference play between the two teams is jarring; this season, the Buckeyes are taking 23 threes per game against Big Ten opponents, and in 2012-13 they took just 14.6. This year, Ohio State is averaging 76 points per game in the B1G, in 2012-13, just a hair under 65. Etcetera.
All of this points to an evolution in men's basketball that has never been more starkly apparent until today.
Okay, I've teased this thing for long enough. Let's talk about the 2013 Big Ten Men's Basketball Tournament Championship Game, which Ohio State won by a score of 50-43.
I can't remember sitting through this slog of a game, although I'm sure that I did. For as much as I enjoyed Jim Tressel's Ohio State teams slowly strangling the life out of their opponents for a decade (and operating on the offensive razor's edge that separates genius from incompetence), basketball isn't meant to be played in single point increments over the course of 40 minutes.
Only two players had 10 points: Wisconsin's Traevon Jackson had exactly that, and Deshaun Thomas was everyone's hero with his customary 17. To put that in perspective, the other four Badger starters combined had 20 points. Not that either team had much help from their bench (Shannon Scott, for example, played 22 freaking minutes and scored exactly zero points but that's probably because he attempted literally one shot), or that either Wisconsin coach Bo Ryan or Thad Matta remembered that it existed.
By the way, this is the point of the article that I'd include some highlights from YouTube or something. I can't find any, which is possibly a function of me being a dumb person, but I think it's more likely that any video evidence that this game ever happened has been rightly scrubbed from the internet. I'd be happy to be proven wrong. Well, not happy, I don't actually want to watch this thing again. But go for it.
My favorite stat from this game is that both teams combined to shoot 4-34 from three.
It's partly my favorite stat because that's hilarious, but also because virtually none of the postgame articles that I've read about the 2013 Big Ten Men's Basketball Tournament Championship Game (even our own) seem to give too much of a crap about it. It's barely mentioned, except in this SBNation article that kind of shrugs and goes "Welp! What are ya gonna do?"
Neither team was able to hit from deep all game, with the Buckeyes going 1-for-15 and the Badgers making just three of their 18 three-point attempts.
And that's it! "Eh! Not ideal, but whatever! Threes are dumb, who cares?"
Anyway a suffocating Ohio State defense held Wisconsin to a paltry 19 points in the second half and Thad Matta beat the odious Bo Ryan at his own extremely boring game.
But here's the thing. A win is still a win, and a championship is still a championship. Box scores don't appear on banners unless that's what you tell the embroiders to do. Chris Holtmann's team eked out a victory against a not very good Minnesota squad yesterday, and looks shaky as they face a team in Purdue that has given them fits this entire season.
That 2012-13 squad made it all the way to the Elite Eight and won 29 games in the process. Theirs is the most recent Big Ten Men's Basketball Tournament Championship for Ohio State. However ugly it was, it worked, and that toughness might just be a lesson for this season's team to learn as they try to write their own history.
