Still a little sleepy after watching the late games yesterday? Finding yourself thinking about the kid with the freshly stitched chin, Greg Oden, more than you're used to?

Yesterday in the Washington Post there was an insightful little article about Oden. It's not too long, but it has plenty of information, starting with his mother dutifully trotting out his birth certificate -- worn and tattered from having been presented at who-knows-how-many AAU tournaments -- proving to writer Adam Kilgore's satisfaction that, despite have the face of father time himself, Gregory Wayne Oden Jr. was indeed born in Buffalo, New York at 4:53 a.m. on Jan. 21, 1988.

The real crux of the story, though, is that Oden's a bit of a geek, in a good way:

He would come home from kindergarten and brag to Zoe about what he had learned. At Lawrence North, he took calculus as a senior and other college-level math courses for two years and earned a 3.8 grade-point average.

"I was excited to get him in class, because I had heard he was such a good student," said Donna McCord, Oden's high school math teacher. "Boy, I was really going to get him. I was like, 'I'll show you.' And he showed me."

He would finish homework assignments in class before McCord finished the lesson. Oden asked questions constantly, usually a step ahead of McCord; her answers, typically, were, "We'll get to that." On one exam, Oden earned a 49 out of 50, then argued with McCord about the point he missed.

Oden still keeps in contact with McCord. When Oden called her two weeks ago, he talked about how much he liked his History of Rock & Roll class and told her a funny story about one of his friends. They never mentioned basketball.

"If you take basketball away from him, I don't think he's going to lay down and die on us," Keefer said. "He wants to be an accountant."

It all sounds great, I guess -- we want well-rounded athletes, right? -- but I'm sure some NBA types will choke a little on that last comment. People who would die without basketball, so goes the conventional wisdom, eat the lunch of people who are there visiting.

Kilgore updates his story on the DC Sports Bog, with this:

...the biggest highlight was Greg Oden, who is a charm to be around. Intelligent, genuine kid. I spent some time in Indianapolis this week for a story running on him in tomorrow's paper, and the people around him are really impressive. It's stunning to consider the environment around Oden compared to that of some other basketball phenoms.

Oden was getting tired of the media scrum that surrounded him during every interview session, so he hatched this scheme, which is brilliant: He placed a chair in front of each locker next to him, and then two managers sat in each one, which created a buffer so there weren't so many recorders and mini-cams jammed three inches from his face. ...

"I just thought about it," Oden said. "I get flocked. I figured, why I don't I get two guys to sit next me and protect me? They said Troy Smith took four years to think of this, and it only took me about one."

See ... smart. That's smart. I'll be rooting for him, anyway.

UPDATE: Will Leitch runs Deadspin. He is finishing a book. And he writes for the website of The New York Times. I know not when, if ever, he sleeps. In any case, Leitch wrote about Oden for the Times (subscription required):

Oden ended up making the key play of the night, blocking the potential game-winning shot by Ramar Smith, and afterwards, in all the euphoria, not a single one of his facial muscles moved. This is not easy to do, even if you are trying. ... Oden is not a player, like fellow phenom Kevin Durant, who takes a game by the throat and makes it his. He simply waits, impassively, patiently, until the ball, or a dribbling player, or a low-arcing shot, graces his field of vision ... and then he imposes his will on it. There is no need to be excited when your job is to extinguish excitement from others. Why get so worked up? I'm huge. It might not always be beautiful to watch, but what is truly efficient rarely is.