NEWARK, N.J. — Two cups sit in front of Kentucky coach John Calipari. In one is the best freshman of the year and perhaps the best player in the country, Ohio State center Jared Sullinger. In the other are veteran swingmen and deadly 3-point shooters David Lighty, Jon Diebler and William Buford.Go ahead, Cal, pick your poison. Which one are you picking up and drinking?That’s likely the situation Calipari and the Kentucky men’s basketball team faces Friday at 9:45 p.m. when the fourth-seeded Wildcats face No. 1 overall seed Ohio State in the Sweet 16 in Newark, N.J. In a perfect world, Calipari would choose to shut down both Sullinger and the perimeter players of Ohio State, but there’s a better chance of the temperatures rising above 60 degrees in frigid Newark than completely neutralizing OSU’s two biggest strengths.”There are times I watch the tape and I go, ‘Oh, my goodness,’ ” Calipari said Thursday at a news conference at the Prudential Center. “They are really talented. They play to their strengths. They are very skilled. They shoot, they bounce. They have got great strength, they have got size. They’re really a terrific basketball team.”Good grief, is there anything Ohio State doesn’t do? That’s the Rubik’s Cube Cal and the Cats will try to solve by Friday. On one hand there is Sullinger, who averaged 17.1 points and 10.0 rebounds per game this year en route to Big Ten Freshman of the Year honors. Some people think he should have received Player of the Year honors in the league, and he’s still very much up for consideration for National Player of the Year.Kentucky freshman forward Terrence Jones has played against Sullinger before and said the OSU big man’s ability to force his way to the basket is what makes him so dangerous.”Just how hard he posts and rebounds and how well he can move for how big he is,” Jones said. “He really can move when it comes to posting up and getting position.”Guarding Sullinger one-on-one could be asking to give up 25 points and 12 rebounds, so naturally, if you’re a coach, you put Josh Harrellson and another guy on him and double team him, right?”It’ll be a good matchup,” freshman guard Doron Lamb said. “Josh is playing the best he’s ever played. We just have to see what happens. Josh is going to keep fighting on him and make it hard for him and keep him out of the paint.”But if you focus on Sullinger, you leave the nation’s top 3-point shooting team (42.4 percent) open for looks around the perimeter. Maybe you can put defensive stopper DeAndre Liggins on the Big Ten’s all-time leading 3-pointer shooter, Diebler (110 of 220 behind the arch this season), but then you run the risk of leaving Buford and Lighty, who are more than capable of knocking down treys (44.4 percent and 43.5 percent, respectively), against weaker defenders.Against George Mason, in the second round of the NCAA Tournament, Ohio State knocked down 16 shots from behind the arc, one of several sensational shooting displays from the Buckeyes this year. Diebler alone had games in which he drilled 10 of 12 (at Penn State) and 7 of 8 (against Wisconsin), and Lighty nailed all seven of his 3-point shots in the rout of George Mason. “You don’t want any team that’s going to make that many 3s or you can’t win the game,” Jones said. “We’re really going to try to take that away.”Kentucky could employ a similar strategy to the one it used on Vanderbilt in the game in Lexington. After allowing 11 3-pointers in the loss in Nashville, Tenn., Calipari opted to play the perimeter in the second meeting and leave Harrellson one-on-one with Festus Ezeli in the paint. Ezeli scored 22 points that game, but the Cats got into Vanderbilt’s marksmen and limited the Commodores to only two triples. Most importantly, UK won that game.Of course, Vanderbilt didn’t have a point guard like Ohio State’s Aaron Craft, who can do a little bit of everything for the Buckeyes at the point guard position. Craft is averaging 7.1 points as a freshman, can get to the basket and knock down the 3 (38.8 percent), but he’s also a lethal distributor. He dishes out 4.9 assists per game, including a career-high 15 last weekend.
When you include Craft alongside Sullinger, the stable of veterans, and then add DeShaun Thomas, another super freshman, and big man Dallas Lauderdale (4.3 points per game), you’re talking about one of the two or three elite teams in the country.”I think over years there was really a clear-cut two or three teams, and I think (Ohio State and Kansas) separated from the rest,” Calipari said. “They are that good. They deserve the accolades that both of the teams are getting.”How exactly to stop them, though, the Kentucky players are not telling. No matter how many times a reporter tried to get an idea for UK’s strategy from freshman guard Brandon Knight, he stuck with “we haven’t watched a whole lot of film yet” answer.That’s par for the course for Kentucky, which usually doesn’t show its players a lot of tape of the opposition before a game. Even so, the UK players don’t want to give up what they might have up their sleeve for the vaunted Buckeyes.”I think it will change,” Jones said, declining to show Kentucky’s hand. “There might be a lot of switches. I don’t know really who is going to guard who.”If there is one thing Kentucky possesses that Ohio State hasn’t seen a lot of, it’s size and length. The Buckeyes say they’re concerned about UK’s athleticism on the wings and how it will disrupt their game plan, and Lighty said Kentucky reminds him of Tennessee last year.The Volunteers, as you may or may not know, went on to beat Ohio State in the Sweet 16.”They are athletic, they get out and run, (and) they push the pace,” Lighty said of Kentucky. “They have bigs, they have wings and they have a guard who can pretty much do it all. If we don’t come ready to play, it’s going to be a long night for us.”