General20
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First, IUP is a really good D2 team. They won't be the worst team we'll play this year. They're better than a few of the mid majors we are going to go up against. Plus, they played the game to win rather than using it as a glorified practice, which is a great thing for Syracuse.
Second, IUP came out with a match-up zone. Obviously, this stage of the season is still practice so you're going to worry about yourself and not scout your opponent much at all, but a match-up zone is tricky to play against and requires some scouting. This is the biggest reason Syracuse struggled early offensively but picked up quickly as they figured out what worked and what didn't. The biggest reason they started slow defensively is because they were playing around with man to man. Once they stopped doing that and stuck to the press/zone IUP stopped scoring.
Onto what Syracuse did.
First (as mentioned) they played a lot of man to man D (by our recent standards). I'm not sure this means anything. I've seen Boeheim play more man to man D than this in previous exhibition games and still not play any man to man D during the actual season.
Second, SU started with Howard, White, Lydon, Roberson, and Coleman on the court. After a few minutes all five came off and were replaced with Gillon, Battle, Moyer, Thompson, and Chukwu . . . and that's when Syracuse started upping the tempo and playing pressure D. Now, I dont think the 5 starters are our 5 best players, and I don't think they are the 5 players who will play the most. I also don't think you'll see Boeheim sub 5 guys at one time during the season. But nevertheless, I do think we can learn something from this substitution pattern. Boeheim is looking at his bench guys as the energy guys. Gillon and Battle are going to come in and change the tempo of the game and Chukwu is going to allow them to do it by guarding our basket, that's why they are coming off the bench as opposed to the other choices. How the minutes are distributed is still very much up for discussion.
Third, we pressed . . . a lot. I mean a lot. More than I can ever remember seeing any Syracuse team press in any situation. I've got to imagine this means something going forward. Maybe we pressed because we got into a early hole. Maybe we just needed to work on the press. But I think its more than that. They pressed so much and for so long that I can't imagine it wont be a major part of our plans going forward.
An interesting note on the press. A couple times they set up to press, then faked IUP out and just dropped back into zone without applying any actual pressure. I can't remember ever seeing Syracuse do that before.
Now for the downside, the press looked pretty bad. They got a decent amount of turnovers out of it, but most of those were self inflicted because it was the first exhibition game, and wouldn't happen mid-season. Even though they pressed pretty much all game long there was only one instance where they really forced IUP into a turnover. The caveat to this is IUP was playing with 4 and often times 5 guards on the court, so they're a harder team to press than any ACC team is likely to be. Still, Boeheim's going to need to work on this a lot if its going to be a strength of ours.
Onto the individual performances.
Howard - The match-up zone confused him a little (which I don't particularly hold against him) and also made it hard for him to do the kinds of things he does best. But he showed an improved shooting stroke by hitting a couple long range shots and going 4-4 from the line. He also clearly began to figure their D out as the game wore on, which is a good thing. Where you saw Howard shine in this game was in transition.
Gillon - Looked great in this game and clearly played better than Howard. Only took 3 shots but made two of them, scored 6 points, and had 9 assists with only 2 turnovers. This was my first time seeing him play and I came away impressed. He brings a lot of skills to the table and is a great finisher around the basket.
The Howard/Gillon playing time battle - Its really not so simple as to say Gillon played better and therefore is the better player. As a 5th year senior Gillon should know how to dominate a savvy D2 team like IUP, plus the match-up zone they played favored the skills he brings to the table over the skills Howard brings to the table; but we aren't going to see much match up zone during the regular season. I actually think Howard looked better than Gillon in the press and in transition which are the places I was expecting Gillon to have an edge. Reading the tea leaves here, I think that's a bad sign for Gillon's PT going forward. Though there will still be a place for him in the regular rotation, I see Howard playing more.
Battle - Wow, the star of the game. I saw him play several times in high school so I knew he was a better shooter than people were saying, and I knew he had a high basketball IQ, but I was not expecting to see all that on display in the first exhibition game. Exhibition games are notoriously tough for freshman guards. I clearly remember Jonny Flynn struggling like crazy against LeMoyne in his first exhibition game, then looking only a little better in his second exhibition game, before scoring 27 points out of nowhere on opening day against a very good Siena team that went to the sweet 16 that year. Battle had no such struggles against IUP. He's a ready made D1 player. Obviously he's not going to shoot 4-5 from three every game, but he proved he can shoot it, and much more impressively he had no problem picking apart IUP's match-up zone which is something most freshmen struggle against any time in the season, much less their first ever game. Battle had 2 assists, but should have had 5 or 6. Lydon himself blew two dunks that Battle set him up for with sharp passing. I'll be interested to see if he plays point at all this year. I have little doubt that he can handle it. Defensively, Battle makes for an imposing figure at the top of the zone. He looks every bit of 6'7, and he's the fastest, most athletic guy on the team. Imagine when team's don't zone him and he can actually use that athleticism on offense!
White - The two knocks on him at Nebraska were that he never handled the ball and he never passed. I had a feeling this was more a product of situation than of skill (Nebraska played with 5 guards, and White being 6'7 was basically a stretch power forward for them). Sure enough, he did more passing and more ball handling in this game than he did in any of the games I watched him play for Nebraska. Don't get me wrong, you're not going to confuse him for Magic Johnson any time soon, but he can play the 2 for us and give us the added ball handling a 2 needs to give, just fine, and he won't be a black hole on offense. On defense he split time between the 2 and the 3 as we expected. He looked better defensively at the top of the zone than he did at the back of the zone (though he was below average in both spots), but I'm not sure this is going to matter. We will play him wherever we need to play him to best exploit our opposition. It will mostly depend on how the opposing team wants to attack us. White didn't have his best shooting day, going 2-7 from three, but I have a feeling that if we see a match-up zone in the regular season (where we actually scout the team) we'll get White in some dangerous areas and he'll have a big game.
Roberson - Star of the game #2! I came away extremely impressed. Let me start by saying this, Roberson at his core is the player that does the dirty work and gets the garbage baskets, and that kind of player really isn't needed in this kind of game, so I was not expecting much about Roberson to stand out. I was wrong. His post up game stood out, big time. Its clear he's put a ton of work into it, and there's been a night and day improvement over last year. At one point he hit a smooth hook shot over his right shoulder against the opposing center, then the next time Roberson came up against him he faked the same hook and spun to his left for a layup. All silky smooth, with a soft touch, clearly practiced thousands of times over and again during the summer. Roberson had 14 points on 7-9 shooting, and 7 rebounds. Pretty darn good for a garbage man type player when there's no garbage around.
Coleman - Looked great. Looked assured in the post, and scored every time he got his hands on the ball (going 3-3 from the floor and drawing two shooting fouls). Coleman looked like a freight train under the basket and IUP's poor center didn't stand a chance of stopping him. This was the kind of game where Coleman could have scored 50 had he played all game long and had Syracuse kept feeding him. But Coleman didn't score 50 points, he only scored 7. This is mostly because he only played 11 minutes - the fewest of any player on the team except Moyer (who is coming off an injury and might red shirt). Reading the tea leaves, I think this is bad news for Coleman's PT. I mentioned over the summer that I thought Coleman might improve a lot and still find himself sitting the bench this season simply because Boeheim has a wonderful offense/defense combo in Lydon and Chukwu, and its hard to imagine any center bringing more to the table offensively than Lydon will bring and any more to the table defensively than Chukwu has the potential to bring. The good news for Coleman is that's he's the starting center, and he's much better than he was last year. The bad news is, that might not be good enough to earn major minutes when it matters. What could have been if not for injuries. I firmly believe Coleman would have been an all american had he stayed healthy all four years.
Lydon - Looked a little like Gulliver in Lilliput against the small IUP team. The good side of that is Lydon shot 5-10 from the floor despite going 0-4 from three (4 dunks and a hook shot). He also got 10 boards, 2 blocks and 2 steals. The bad side is Lydon struggled away from the basket, not making any threes and looking bad when IUP forced him to put the ball on the floor. Not sure there's much of a take away here. No ACC team is going to play this way, and like White, I think Lydon would have benefited a lot from a scouting report and a game plan dedicated to allowing his shooting to hurt their zone.
Chukwu - Exhibition games against D2 teams are probably the worst place to try to evaluate a big man, so I don't have much to say here. I don't think we learned anything about Chukwu in this game. All I'll say is SU looked much better when they pressed and Chukwu was guarding the basket than they did when Coleman was guarding the basket, but I would think most expected this to be true anyway.
Thompson - My first time ever seeing him play, and I came away very impressed. Frankly, he's just a better player than I was expecting him to be. He's got a good frame and should grow into a big strong center. He moves well for a big guy. He's got some skill. He drove to the basket and picked up a foul, hit a hook shot, and generally did some really positive things down low. Even looks to have a bit of a mean streak on the boards. I'm super excited to see him grow into a star for SU.
Moyer - He's really rangy. Got his hands on a lot of loose balls and looks great at rebounding the ball out of his area (which is a rare skill). He's athletic, and can handle the ball a bit, I think he'll even have a decent jump shot before its all said and done. That said, he needs to put on some muscle, big time, and he should probably red shirt. Not going to be a factor this season either way.
Second, IUP came out with a match-up zone. Obviously, this stage of the season is still practice so you're going to worry about yourself and not scout your opponent much at all, but a match-up zone is tricky to play against and requires some scouting. This is the biggest reason Syracuse struggled early offensively but picked up quickly as they figured out what worked and what didn't. The biggest reason they started slow defensively is because they were playing around with man to man. Once they stopped doing that and stuck to the press/zone IUP stopped scoring.
Onto what Syracuse did.
First (as mentioned) they played a lot of man to man D (by our recent standards). I'm not sure this means anything. I've seen Boeheim play more man to man D than this in previous exhibition games and still not play any man to man D during the actual season.
Second, SU started with Howard, White, Lydon, Roberson, and Coleman on the court. After a few minutes all five came off and were replaced with Gillon, Battle, Moyer, Thompson, and Chukwu . . . and that's when Syracuse started upping the tempo and playing pressure D. Now, I dont think the 5 starters are our 5 best players, and I don't think they are the 5 players who will play the most. I also don't think you'll see Boeheim sub 5 guys at one time during the season. But nevertheless, I do think we can learn something from this substitution pattern. Boeheim is looking at his bench guys as the energy guys. Gillon and Battle are going to come in and change the tempo of the game and Chukwu is going to allow them to do it by guarding our basket, that's why they are coming off the bench as opposed to the other choices. How the minutes are distributed is still very much up for discussion.
Third, we pressed . . . a lot. I mean a lot. More than I can ever remember seeing any Syracuse team press in any situation. I've got to imagine this means something going forward. Maybe we pressed because we got into a early hole. Maybe we just needed to work on the press. But I think its more than that. They pressed so much and for so long that I can't imagine it wont be a major part of our plans going forward.
An interesting note on the press. A couple times they set up to press, then faked IUP out and just dropped back into zone without applying any actual pressure. I can't remember ever seeing Syracuse do that before.
Now for the downside, the press looked pretty bad. They got a decent amount of turnovers out of it, but most of those were self inflicted because it was the first exhibition game, and wouldn't happen mid-season. Even though they pressed pretty much all game long there was only one instance where they really forced IUP into a turnover. The caveat to this is IUP was playing with 4 and often times 5 guards on the court, so they're a harder team to press than any ACC team is likely to be. Still, Boeheim's going to need to work on this a lot if its going to be a strength of ours.
Onto the individual performances.
Howard - The match-up zone confused him a little (which I don't particularly hold against him) and also made it hard for him to do the kinds of things he does best. But he showed an improved shooting stroke by hitting a couple long range shots and going 4-4 from the line. He also clearly began to figure their D out as the game wore on, which is a good thing. Where you saw Howard shine in this game was in transition.
Gillon - Looked great in this game and clearly played better than Howard. Only took 3 shots but made two of them, scored 6 points, and had 9 assists with only 2 turnovers. This was my first time seeing him play and I came away impressed. He brings a lot of skills to the table and is a great finisher around the basket.
The Howard/Gillon playing time battle - Its really not so simple as to say Gillon played better and therefore is the better player. As a 5th year senior Gillon should know how to dominate a savvy D2 team like IUP, plus the match-up zone they played favored the skills he brings to the table over the skills Howard brings to the table; but we aren't going to see much match up zone during the regular season. I actually think Howard looked better than Gillon in the press and in transition which are the places I was expecting Gillon to have an edge. Reading the tea leaves here, I think that's a bad sign for Gillon's PT going forward. Though there will still be a place for him in the regular rotation, I see Howard playing more.
Battle - Wow, the star of the game. I saw him play several times in high school so I knew he was a better shooter than people were saying, and I knew he had a high basketball IQ, but I was not expecting to see all that on display in the first exhibition game. Exhibition games are notoriously tough for freshman guards. I clearly remember Jonny Flynn struggling like crazy against LeMoyne in his first exhibition game, then looking only a little better in his second exhibition game, before scoring 27 points out of nowhere on opening day against a very good Siena team that went to the sweet 16 that year. Battle had no such struggles against IUP. He's a ready made D1 player. Obviously he's not going to shoot 4-5 from three every game, but he proved he can shoot it, and much more impressively he had no problem picking apart IUP's match-up zone which is something most freshmen struggle against any time in the season, much less their first ever game. Battle had 2 assists, but should have had 5 or 6. Lydon himself blew two dunks that Battle set him up for with sharp passing. I'll be interested to see if he plays point at all this year. I have little doubt that he can handle it. Defensively, Battle makes for an imposing figure at the top of the zone. He looks every bit of 6'7, and he's the fastest, most athletic guy on the team. Imagine when team's don't zone him and he can actually use that athleticism on offense!
White - The two knocks on him at Nebraska were that he never handled the ball and he never passed. I had a feeling this was more a product of situation than of skill (Nebraska played with 5 guards, and White being 6'7 was basically a stretch power forward for them). Sure enough, he did more passing and more ball handling in this game than he did in any of the games I watched him play for Nebraska. Don't get me wrong, you're not going to confuse him for Magic Johnson any time soon, but he can play the 2 for us and give us the added ball handling a 2 needs to give, just fine, and he won't be a black hole on offense. On defense he split time between the 2 and the 3 as we expected. He looked better defensively at the top of the zone than he did at the back of the zone (though he was below average in both spots), but I'm not sure this is going to matter. We will play him wherever we need to play him to best exploit our opposition. It will mostly depend on how the opposing team wants to attack us. White didn't have his best shooting day, going 2-7 from three, but I have a feeling that if we see a match-up zone in the regular season (where we actually scout the team) we'll get White in some dangerous areas and he'll have a big game.
Roberson - Star of the game #2! I came away extremely impressed. Let me start by saying this, Roberson at his core is the player that does the dirty work and gets the garbage baskets, and that kind of player really isn't needed in this kind of game, so I was not expecting much about Roberson to stand out. I was wrong. His post up game stood out, big time. Its clear he's put a ton of work into it, and there's been a night and day improvement over last year. At one point he hit a smooth hook shot over his right shoulder against the opposing center, then the next time Roberson came up against him he faked the same hook and spun to his left for a layup. All silky smooth, with a soft touch, clearly practiced thousands of times over and again during the summer. Roberson had 14 points on 7-9 shooting, and 7 rebounds. Pretty darn good for a garbage man type player when there's no garbage around.
Coleman - Looked great. Looked assured in the post, and scored every time he got his hands on the ball (going 3-3 from the floor and drawing two shooting fouls). Coleman looked like a freight train under the basket and IUP's poor center didn't stand a chance of stopping him. This was the kind of game where Coleman could have scored 50 had he played all game long and had Syracuse kept feeding him. But Coleman didn't score 50 points, he only scored 7. This is mostly because he only played 11 minutes - the fewest of any player on the team except Moyer (who is coming off an injury and might red shirt). Reading the tea leaves, I think this is bad news for Coleman's PT. I mentioned over the summer that I thought Coleman might improve a lot and still find himself sitting the bench this season simply because Boeheim has a wonderful offense/defense combo in Lydon and Chukwu, and its hard to imagine any center bringing more to the table offensively than Lydon will bring and any more to the table defensively than Chukwu has the potential to bring. The good news for Coleman is that's he's the starting center, and he's much better than he was last year. The bad news is, that might not be good enough to earn major minutes when it matters. What could have been if not for injuries. I firmly believe Coleman would have been an all american had he stayed healthy all four years.
Lydon - Looked a little like Gulliver in Lilliput against the small IUP team. The good side of that is Lydon shot 5-10 from the floor despite going 0-4 from three (4 dunks and a hook shot). He also got 10 boards, 2 blocks and 2 steals. The bad side is Lydon struggled away from the basket, not making any threes and looking bad when IUP forced him to put the ball on the floor. Not sure there's much of a take away here. No ACC team is going to play this way, and like White, I think Lydon would have benefited a lot from a scouting report and a game plan dedicated to allowing his shooting to hurt their zone.
Chukwu - Exhibition games against D2 teams are probably the worst place to try to evaluate a big man, so I don't have much to say here. I don't think we learned anything about Chukwu in this game. All I'll say is SU looked much better when they pressed and Chukwu was guarding the basket than they did when Coleman was guarding the basket, but I would think most expected this to be true anyway.
Thompson - My first time ever seeing him play, and I came away very impressed. Frankly, he's just a better player than I was expecting him to be. He's got a good frame and should grow into a big strong center. He moves well for a big guy. He's got some skill. He drove to the basket and picked up a foul, hit a hook shot, and generally did some really positive things down low. Even looks to have a bit of a mean streak on the boards. I'm super excited to see him grow into a star for SU.
Moyer - He's really rangy. Got his hands on a lot of loose balls and looks great at rebounding the ball out of his area (which is a rare skill). He's athletic, and can handle the ball a bit, I think he'll even have a decent jump shot before its all said and done. That said, he needs to put on some muscle, big time, and he should probably red shirt. Not going to be a factor this season either way.
