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Message: [QUOTE="Niastri, post: 169078, member: 722"] Our current situation has been spelled out. We are grinding with medium level Big East teams. But, medium level Big East teams are still tough teams to play against. Nobody here thought Melo was as important as he turned out to be. Suddenly, our games are like most Big East games. We are suffering hard grind out type games where the officials matter much more than they should. Syracuse lost in a stunner to a Notre Dame team who caught us on a day where we were terrible and the team was in shock about the loss of two of their guys. We know that Melo is the only player that matters, but Jones leaving had to hurt these guys a bit. In the last three games, we have played teams ranked 17 (WVU) 96 (Cinci) and 82(ND). We lost one of those games badly. ND smacking us hurt us all badly. However, what we have left isn't that bad of a team. If we started the season with this roster, we would have already seen all our small forwards pretend to be rebounders. We would have been ok with undersized Keita (who was great last year) and MCD CENTER Rak Christmas playing our center position. We are now life after death. We lost somebody. We loved how he played. We will miss him. Our team was going to be very good if we had to rely on Christmas and Keita at center, and with Joseph, Southerland and Fair as our forwards, with Jones as a backup. The only thing we lost from this scenario is Jones, who wasn't going to play anyway. C: Keita/Christmas PF: Joseph/Christmas : Fair/Southerland SG: Triche/Waiters PG: Jardine/Carter-Williams Any one of us would have gone to war with Keita and Christmas fighting over Center. Unfortunately, we would have been just another Syracuse team with undersized pivot players, but we would have easily expected both our big men to improve during the season. We would have expected Christmas to be a very good big man by season end, and suffered through his growing pains. We already knew what was wrong with Keita regarding bulk. We already knew that Joseph, Southerland and Fair are not big forwards yet. OK, so lets play this game out like it is before the season. We won a lot of games with Melo, who proved to be great! C: Keita/Christmas PF: Joseph/Christmas : Fair/Southerland SG: Triche/Waiters PG: Jardine/Carter-Williams Keita and Christmas are learning to play center again for more than a couple minutes. Joseph/Southerland/Fair are learning that they have a new center at the position, and they now have to work very hard to rebound. Our guards are learning that the center position actually does matter on offense! Melo had an effect on every part of the game, and now that he is gone, the team needs to learn how to play again against the hardest possible competition. AND YET WE ARE STILL WINNING! [/QUOTE]

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