Southern Cali Sports

The USC  Trojan Basketball team played probably
their best game of the year yesterday to defeat a Texas Team that features
arguably the best player in college basketball (Kevin Durant).

Coming into this game all anybody wanted to talk about
was Texas start freshman Kevin Durant and D.J. Augustine. Part of this “bias”
has to do with the Trojans playing in the Pac-10 and playing the majority of
their games when the East Coast and some of the Mid-West are fast asleep. Well
Sunday afternoon that wasn’t a problem and there’s a new pair of freshman that
deserve to be talked about.

Taj Gibson has been doing it all year for the Trojans. He
began to falter a bit late in the season but seems to have rejuvenated himself
since the tournament began. He ended yesterdays game with 17 points and 14
boards, a very respectable performance.

Daniel Hacket, the freshman point guard,  has been a
scrappy player all season and one thing you have to give this guy is he is not
afraid to take a shot and he had the biggest game of his career in probably the
biggest game of his life to date. Not only did he do a respectable job
defensively on Kevin Durant (Durant scoring most of his 30 some points after the
Trojans already had a double digit lead) but he also dropped 20 points on Texas.

Mad props should also be handed out to Gabe Pruitt for
making Texas star freshman point gaurd (allegedly) D.J. Augustine look like a
freshman. Make no mistake, Augustine’s inability to get the Texas offense into
any type of rhythm is a big reason the Trojans were able to control the entire
game and you can give most of that credit to Pruitt for that.

Next up for SC is top-seeded North Carolina featuring
star post-player Tyler Hansbrough who’s coming off a 33 point performance
against Michigan State. Taj Gibson is going to have his hands full with
Hansbrough and he’s going to have to come up big.

NC also features two “diaper dandies” in forward Brandon
Wright, who averages 14.9 pts per game and point guard Ty Lawson. Lawson is
coming off a 20 - 8 - 5 performance against Michigan State. I’d like to see Gabe
Pruitt do to Lawson what he did to DJ Augustine.

I think we’ve already seen Brandon Wright knees buckle a
bit in the tourney as he finished their last game with only 3 points. Hackett
should make life pretty miserable for him come Friday.

The stage is set for a great game on Friday…

Unfortunately, I don’t think there’s anything the Trojans
can do to stop Hansbrough and worse case scenario Taj Gibson may be in foul
trouble all night trying to defend the guy. It will be real interesting to see
how Tim Floyd (USC Head Coach) plans on defending against the Tar Heels.

Speaking of Tim Floyd…Why isn’t anybody talking about
this guy?