My 2013-14 Syracuse Basketball Preview Part 1 | Syracusefan.com
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My 2013-14 Syracuse Basketball Preview Part 1

SWC75

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The Situation


Peggy Lee once recorded a song called “Is That All There Is?” That’s what Syracuse fans are wondering. We’ve been to the Final Four exactly once in each of the last five decades. We expected to be there in 2010 and 2012 because we had teams that were ranked #1 at points during the season. Both teams lost their starting centers just as the tournament began and couldn’t get o9ut of the regionals. Then last year we staggered to the finish losing 7 of our last 12 games, the worst performance of all in the last game at Georgetown, where we just couldn ’t score and went down hard, 39-61.


But that team picked itself up off the floor and won 7 of 9 post season games, losing only to eventual national champion Louisville in the Big East Tournament and to Michigan in the national semi-finals. Along the way we got revenge on Georgetown in New York 58-55. We made that run by playing lock-down defense but it wasn’t enough. That team was one of the worst offensive teams Syracuse has fielded in memory. We had to win 60-50 type games because we couldn’t score enough to beat good teams without playing fanatical defense.


It’s odd that that team was the one to make it to the Final Four, and a little frustrating. That team really didn’t have what it takes to win the title and the teams we had that did didn’t get there. And, if we only get one trip to the Final Four per decade, why did it have to be that team? Is that all there is for this decade? Why can’t we be like Duke or North Carolina or Kansas or Louisville and got to 2-3 Final Fours each decade and maybe win it all one of those times? Or maybe we have arrived at that level and will get back to the Final Four a couple more times in the next few years- and go with a team that actually has a shot at winning it all? Could one of those years be this year?


We’ve always been good as long as Jim Boeheiim has been our coach- and even before that. We’ve had 43 consecutive winning seasons, the longest streak in the country, (UCLA has the all-time record at 50: I don’t see what will stop us from topping that in eight years). Our coach has the second most wins in college basketball history, 920 in 37 seasons, an average of 25 wins a year. 90% of the schools in college basketball dream of winning 25 games in a year and 90% of the rest would be well satisfied with it. We go into each year knowing that we’ll be good with the chance for something great to happen. And we are getting better. The new standard for an excellent season is 30 wins and we’ve achieved that three times in four years after winning that many in only three prior years.


But we’ve got a new challenge as well. This will be our first year in the Atlantic Coast Conference, traditionally the gold standard for college basketball conferences. In recent years the ACC has been kind of top heavy, with Duke and North Carolina dominating a bunch of not so great teams. I doubt it was actually the best conference top to bottom in that time. But Duke and North Carolina have been so powerful, with 8 national championships in the last 32 seasons that they have made it seem like the dominant conference even when it has not quite been that. The Big East has been the dominant conference in recent years, one that gave us a ranked opponent to play in game after game. If you had any weaknesses, you could expect to pay with defeats, as we did when we lost 9 of 13 and finished 23-12 in 2005-06 or lost 9 of 14 and finished 21-14 in 2007-08. Despite some colossal confrontations with the “Big Two”, I’m not sure the ACC will prove that tough on a game for game basis- except that we are beginning and old nemesis, Pittsburgh, and an occasional nemesis, Notre Dame in with us and will be joined by another nemesis, Louisville next season. But I’m still not sure that the new ACC will have the overall strength of the conference we’ve just left. Boston College, Clemson, Virginia Tech and Wake Forest all had losing records last year while Florida State and Georgia Tech were a total of three games over .500. Miami had its best ever team last year at 29-7 but got wiped out by graduation. NC State may be a coming program- or may not. Maryland and Virginia had good records but didn’t make the Big Dance. What the conference doesn’t have is any true bottom-feeders as we had with Rutgers, DePaul and South Florida in the Big East. There will be no walk-over games. But aside from the big confrontations, I don’t think this conference will pound a struggling team into the hardwood the way the Big East did.


One important difference may be the style of play- and the style of the refereeing. This may be overstated a bit but the Big East developed a reputation for ugly basketball, with teams playing defense like they were auditioning for the WWF or MMA championship. We’d have a bunch of high-flying pre-season games with wide-open basketball where player got to show their skills and then enter the conference schedule and get bogged down in half court wrestling matches. The hope is strong that now, in the ACC, we’ll be playing ‘real’ basketball, where defense is about staying in front of your man, stealing passes and blocking shots, not pushing and grabbing. Also, we used to have great success with Jim Boeheim’s famous 2-3 zone as long as we weren’t playing conference foes who were used to finding ways to beat it. Now- at least in this first year, we’ll be facing teams that haven’t had to deal with it before. This could be to our opponents like Syracuse’s experience facing Georgia Tech’s triple option attack in football- it will take then a while to figure out how to deal with it.


But another important difference is that most of our road games will be true road games- played in on-campus arenas where the college it team is what it’s all about. The Big East was full of teams that played in professional arenas as a filler act for the pro team when they are out of town. There should be more games now where the place will be packed with rabid fans trying to intimidate the visitors- especially the most famous home court in college basketball- Cameron Indoor Arena, where we will play Duke on February 22nd. Mike Krzyzewski, the only coach with more wins than Jim Boeheim, is also his best friend in coaching and they have always refused to schedule each other in the past. They have coached each other twice- in the first Big East-ACC challenge in Greensboro in1989 and in the NCAA tournament in St. Petersburg, Florida in 1998. They split those games. Duke will make their first ever visit to the Dome on February 1st and we will make our first visit to Cameron three weeks later. We’d better bring our A+ game for that one.


I think the real upgrade in schedule, despite the Duke and North Carolina games, is in the non-conference schedule. Oh, we’ll still play teams like Cornell and Colgate, St. Francis of Brooklyn, Binghamton and High Point. But we are trying to maintain some of our old Big East rivalries and will now be meeting teams in December we used to play in Januarys and February. We’ll be playing St. John’s on December 15th and Villanova on December 28th. Then there’s our annual early season tournament. We’re in the Maui Classic, which we’ve won twice before, along with schools like Arkansas, California, Gonzaga, Baylor, Dayton and Minnesota, as well as that perennial upseter, Chaminade. On top of everything else, there’s a December 3rd date in the Dome with Indiana, a team that may be just a little interested in beating us since we knocked them out of the NCAA tournament when they were the #1 seed in the region last year.


This is going to be the toughest schedule we have ever played, full of huge, marquee games. If we can maintain Jim Boeheim’s average of winning 25 games a year, that would be a very good season. Adding to our total of 30 win season is going to be very difficult against this schedule.


We got an early peak at the team when they were allowed, as NCAA are every few years, to go on a foreign tour. They choose to go to Canada to play the top Canadian teams, including Carleton University, who has become the dominate team in that country, having won 9 of the last 11 championships there, the last one by 50 points. Carleton had a veteran line-up of returning players from that team and had already played several games, (college teams can play during the summer there). They’d almost beaten eventual US champion Louisville in the preseason last year and they almost beat us, too. Syracuse rallied from a 15 point second half deficit to win 69-65. They also beat Carleton’s biggest rival, the University of Ottawa 73-50 and blew out McGill University, 80-40 and Bishop’s University 77-35. That was in August. We’ve now played two more exhibition games, one against a Division Ii team, Holy Family and still another Canadian team, Ryerson, beating them both handily, 79-41 and 81-46. None of them were Duke or North Carolina but at least we’ve wrapped up the Canadian championship.
 
Excellent post SWC! I sincerely think you should be getting paid to write somewhere. Informative, and an enjoyable read. I definitely agree about the non-conference schedule not being the cupcake alley we are used to, and that I've lamented season after season. Keep up the good work bro!
 
The Situation


Peggy Lee once recorded a song called “Is That All There Is?” That’s what Syracuse fans are wondering. We’ve been to the Final Four exactly once in each of the last five decades. We expected to be there in 2010 and 2012 because we had teams that were ranked #1 at points during the season. Both teams lost their starting centers just as the tournament began and couldn’t get o9ut of the regionals. Then last year we staggered to the finish losing 7 of our last 12 games, the worst performance of all in the last game at Georgetown, where we just couldn ’t score and went down hard, 39-61.


But that team picked itself up off the floor and won 7 of 9 post season games, losing only to eventual national champion Louisville in the Big East Tournament and to Michigan in the national semi-finals. Along the way we got revenge on Georgetown in New York 58-55. We made that run by playing lock-down defense but it wasn’t enough. That team was one of the worst offensive teams Syracuse has fielded in memory. We had to win 60-50 type games because we couldn’t score enough to beat good teams without playing fanatical defense.


It’s odd that that team was the one to make it to the Final Four, and a little frustrating. That team really didn’t have what it takes to win the title and the teams we had that did didn’t get there. And, if we only get one trip to the Final Four per decade, why did it have to be that team? Is that all there is for this decade? Why can’t we be like Duke or North Carolina or Kansas or Louisville and got to 2-3 Final Fours each decade and maybe win it all one of those times? Or maybe we have arrived at that level and will get back to the Final Four a couple more times in the next few years- and go with a team that actually has a shot at winning it all? Could one of those years be this year?


We’ve always been good as long as Jim Boeheiim has been our coach- and even before that. We’ve had 43 consecutive winning seasons, the longest streak in the country, (UCLA has the all-time record at 50: I don’t see what will stop us from topping that in eight years). Our coach has the second most wins in college basketball history, 920 in 37 seasons, an average of 25 wins a year. 90% of the schools in college basketball dream of winning 25 games in a year and 90% of the rest would be well satisfied with it. We go into each year knowing that we’ll be good with the chance for something great to happen. And we are getting better. The new standard for an excellent season is 30 wins and we’ve achieved that three times in four years after winning that many in only three prior years.


But we’ve got a new challenge as well. This will be our first year in the Atlantic Coast Conference, traditionally the gold standard for college basketball conferences. In recent years the ACC has been kind of top heavy, with Duke and North Carolina dominating a bunch of not so great teams. I doubt it was actually the best conference top to bottom in that time. But Duke and North Carolina have been so powerful, with 8 national championships in the last 32 seasons that they have made it seem like the dominant conference even when it has not quite been that. The Big East has been the dominant conference in recent years, one that gave us a ranked opponent to play in game after game. If you had any weaknesses, you could expect to pay with defeats, as we did when we lost 9 of 13 and finished 23-12 in 2005-06 or lost 9 of 14 and finished 21-14 in 2007-08. Despite some colossal confrontations with the “Big Two”, I’m not sure the ACC will prove that tough on a game for game basis- except that we are beginning and old nemesis, Pittsburgh, and an occasional nemesis, Notre Dame in with us and will be joined by another nemesis, Louisville next season. But I’m still not sure that the new ACC will have the overall strength of the conference we’ve just left. Boston College, Clemson, Virginia Tech and Wake Forest all had losing records last year while Florida State and Georgia Tech were a total of three games over .500. Miami had its best ever team last year at 29-7 but got wiped out by graduation. NC State may be a coming program- or may not. Maryland and Virginia had good records but didn’t make the Big Dance. What the conference doesn’t have is any true bottom-feeders as we had with Rutgers, DePaul and South Florida in the Big East. There will be no walk-over games. But aside from the big confrontations, I don’t think this conference will pound a struggling team into the hardwood the way the Big East did.


One important difference may be the style of play- and the style of the refereeing. This may be overstated a bit but the Big East developed a reputation for ugly basketball, with teams playing defense like they were auditioning for the WWF or MMA championship. We’d have a bunch of high-flying pre-season games with wide-open basketball where player got to show their skills and then enter the conference schedule and get bogged down in half court wrestling matches. The hope is strong that now, in the ACC, we’ll be playing ‘real’ basketball, where defense is about staying in front of your man, stealing passes and blocking shots, not pushing and grabbing. Also, we used to have great success with Jim Boeheim’s famous 2-3 zone as long as we weren’t playing conference foes who were used to finding ways to beat it. Now- at least in this first year, we’ll be facing teams that haven’t had to deal with it before. This could be to our opponents like Syracuse’s experience facing Georgia Tech’s triple option attack in football- it will take then a while to figure out how to deal with it.


But another important difference is that most of our road games will be true road games- played in on-campus arenas where the college it team is what it’s all about. The Big East was full of teams that played in professional arenas as a filler act for the pro team when they are out of town. There should be more games now where the place will be packed with rabid fans trying to intimidate the visitors- especially the most famous home court in college basketball- Cameron Indoor Arena, where we will play Duke on February 22nd. Mike Krzyzewski, the only coach with more wins than Jim Boeheim, is also his best friend in coaching and they have always refused to schedule each other in the past. They have coached each other twice- in the first Big East-ACC challenge in Greensboro in1989 and in the NCAA tournament in St. Petersburg, Florida in 1998. They split those games. Duke will make their first ever visit to the Dome on February 1st and we will make our first visit to Cameron three weeks later. We’d better bring our A+ game for that one.


I think the real upgrade in schedule, despite the Duke and North Carolina games, is in the non-conference schedule. Oh, we’ll still play teams like Cornell and Colgate, St. Francis of Brooklyn, Binghamton and High Point. But we are trying to maintain some of our old Big East rivalries and will now be meeting teams in December we used to play in Januarys and February. We’ll be playing St. John’s on December 15th and Villanova on December 28th. Then there’s our annual early season tournament. We’re in the Maui Classic, which we’ve won twice before, along with schools like Arkansas, California, Gonzaga, Baylor, Dayton and Minnesota, as well as that perennial upseter, Chaminade. On top of everything else, there’s a December 3rd date in the Dome with Indiana, a team that may be just a little interested in beating us since we knocked them out of the NCAA tournament when they were the #1 seed in the region last year.


This is going to be the toughest schedule we have ever played, full of huge, marquee games. If we can maintain Jim Boeheim’s average of winning 25 games a year, that would be a very good season. Adding to our total of 30 win season is going to be very difficult against this schedule.


We got an early peak at the team when they were allowed, as NCAA are every few years, to go on a foreign tour. They choose to go to Canada to play the top Canadian teams, including Carleton University, who has become the dominate team in that country, having won 9 of the last 11 championships there, the last one by 50 points. Carleton had a veteran line-up of returning players from that team and had already played several games, (college teams can play during the summer there). They’d almost beaten eventual US champion Louisville in the preseason last year and they almost beat us, too. Syracuse rallied from a 15 point second half deficit to win 69-65. They also beat Carleton’s biggest rival, the University of Ottawa 73-50 and blew out McGill University, 80-40 and Bishop’s University 77-35. That was in August. We’ve now played two more exhibition games, one against a Division Ii team, Holy Family and still another Canadian team, Ryerson, beating them both handily, 79-41 and 81-46. None of them were Duke or North Carolina but at least we’ve wrapped up the Canadian championship.

If this doesn't get you excited for Syracuse's hoops season, I don't know what could.

Also, on all the opinion stuff (Final Fours, last year's team, new conference strength, out of conference schedule) - spot on. It's like I wrote that (only you put the time in to make it readable and nice).
 
I hope you don't mind, but I am going to copy and paste what you wrote to some of my SU friends. This should make them want to join our forum!
 
I hope you don't mind, but I am going to copy and paste what you wrote to some of my SU friends. This should make them want to join our forum!


Be my guest. That's what I'm doing.
 

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