LAS VEGAS – No one was hyping it on any of the Internet basketball sites last week.

But one of the most intriguing individual match-ups of the five-day stretch of play during the three national high school tournaments in town will take place Wednesday in Cox Pavilion.

The Los Angeles-based Pump-N-Run Select team – with former UCLA coach Jim Harrick calling the shots from the bench – will take on D.C. Assault at 11:30 a.m. for the championship of the adidas Super Sixty Four Tournament.

But the game-within-the-game should be every bit as intriguing as the game itself.

That’s because it will likely feature a showdown between a couple of the elite “shooting guard� prospects in the national class of 2007: Artesia’s James Harden for PNR and Austin Freeman, of Hyattsville, Md.’s DeMatha and the Washington, D.C.-based Assault squad.

The 6-foot-3, 210-pound Freeman, who committed to Georgetown a year ago, dropped 33 points on Double Pump Elite (the other squad assembled by twin brothers David and Dana Pump and sponsored by adidas) in a semifinal played Tuesday night at Desert Pines High.

Harden (6-5, 200) came into Las Vegas last week as my top-ranked senior prospect in California and has done nothing to sway that opinion while playing for a team that also includes Austin Daye (Woodbridge), Drew Viney (Villa Park), Larry Drew (Taft) and Clint Amberry (Los Alamitos).

Some 18 miles southeast of Cox Pavilion (located just off the UNLV campus, just west of The Strip) at Foothill High, two teams from Southern California, the heavily favored Southern California All-Stars and H Squad, are among the eight teams still in contention for the championship in the Open Division of the Reebok Big Time Tournament.

The All-Stars have a roster that includes Taylor King (Mater Dei), Malik Story (Artesia), Daniel Hackett (St. John Bosco) and Brandon Jennings (formerly of Dominguez but scheduled to enroll at Oak Hill Academy in Virginia), along with imports Kevin Love (the Oregon center who committed to UCLA Tuesday) and Renardo Sidney (who is from Mississippi but reportedly is relocating to Southern California and plans to enroll at Artesia).

The team, assembled by Pat Barrett, is expected to win its quarterfinal (vs. a squad from Minnesota) and semifinal games, then probably face the Mean Streets Express team out of Chicago in Wednesday night’s 6:20 final.

The H Squad is heavily laden with players who have exhausted their high school eligibility, most notably guard Seketoure Henry, who was a Best in the West selection at Lynwood as a senior during the 2004-05 academic year. He is expected to attend prep school (he was at Patterson in Lenoir, N.C., in ’05-06) once again this fall in hopes of eventually become academically eligible at a NCAA Division I program.