SWC75
Bored Historian
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(I'll post this in a series of posts due to length. Note that I’m using the second year of a season to designate the season: this is previewing the 2019-20 season, which I will call the 2020 season.)
THE SITUATION
We are now ending a very interesting decade for Syracuse University basketball. The first half of the decade with three teams achieving a #1 ranking and a fourth making the Final Four, (we’ve had five teams in our history get to the top of the rankings and six reach the Final Four and that’s eleven different teams) was a peak in the program’s glorious history. The big issue back then was: “When are we going to win our second national championship?” Instead Duke won their fourth and fifth, Connecticut won their third and fourth, Kentucky won their eighth, Louisville won their third, Villanova won their second and third, North Carolina won their sixth and now Virginia has won their first.
But we were beyond caring about that because we got hit with our second probation and began a series of years where we either weren’t eligible for the NCAA tournament, were not chosen or were barely chosen, to the consternation of the program’s critics. From 2010-2014 we were 149-32, (.823). Since then we are 103-70 (.595). We’ve made a couple of good post season runs: In 2016 we won four games to get to our sixth Final Four but we were over-matched by North Carolina, 66-83. It was not unlike the 1975 run, when we were just a regional program making noise on the national scene for the first time in a decade and got clobbered by Kentucky 79-95. Then, in 2018 we won our way from the “First Four” to the Sweet 16, (three wins), where we nearly bumped off Duke. But we are tired of bubble teams and Cinderella runs. We’re SYRACUSE! We want to get back to where we were early in the decade where we were wondering why we weren’t winning the national championship.
That may take a while. We were not just held back by the probation, which denies you scholarships but also has you recruiting on eggshells, not wanting to get in trouble again. There was the succession plan where Jim Boeheim would have been retired by now and Mike Hopkins would be our coach. But, either Hopkins decided to leave so Boeheim decided not to retire or Boeheim decided he didn’t want to retire so Hopkins left. Mike went back to his native West Coast, where he has been named PAC 12 Coach of the year twice in a row at Washington, where he is 48-22, (.686) in those two seasons and should continue to do very well with recruits like Isaiah Stewart out of Rochester and Quade Green out of Philadelphia, both of whom Jim Boeheim had badly wanted.
People have questioned how well young players relate to the soon to be 75 year old Boeheim. We no longer seem to be in the running for the top recruits any more, (the probation likely has a lot do with that: we won’t do what might be necessary to get them to come here). But most of those recent national champions were not keyed by “one and doners” but rather by veteran line-ups filled with juniors and seniors. We’ve had a lot of guys in recent years who were not the type to carry us to a national title in a year or two but might have been a key part of a championship caliber team if they’d stayed and fully developed their talents here: Donte Greene, Jonny Flynn , Dion Waiters, Jerami Grant, Chris McCullough, Malachi Richardson, Tyler Lydon and Oshae Brissett. Everybody loses players but a lot of those are guys who didn’t pan out and some of them made it big and were lottery picks. We seem to lose the late first round, second round guys who might have become lottery picks had they stayed. The Connecticut, Louisville, Villanova, North Carolina and Virginia national champions held on to those kind of guys.
I think JB may have changed his recruiting strategy because of this. Historically, he has not used the entire compliment of scholarships the NCAA allows, (13) on recruited players, (I use that term because walk-ons can be given scholarships and JB, who was a walk-on himself, likes to do that: Shawn Belbey, a 5-10 guard who will rarely see the court, already has one. He doesn’t want guys who came here expecting to play, sitting on the end of the bench, griping about their status on the team. He prefers about 10 recruited players which gives him enough such players to scrimmage 5 on 5, enough depth for completion for spots and to absorb a reasonable number of injuries, foul trouble and other problems without having to resort to using the walk-ons in competitive situations. That system was severely tested two years ago when we started off with 10 guys, then one never showed up, another left the team after a couple of weeks and a third tore up his knee halfway through the season. We went through the ACC schedule with just seven guys – and all the way to the Sweet 16 where we gave Duke all they could handle.
When Jim was doing his recruiting for the coming season, he had 8 guys who still had eligibility left- and none were going to be seniors. But he went out and recruited 5 new players. That gave him the NCAA limit of 13, with all of them eligible not just for the 2020 season but also for the 2021 season. And yet he continued recruiting for that season, as well, saying that we can assume we’ll probably lose a couple of guys each year that could have come back. I think JB wants the next guys to already be here, learning his system, for when he suddenly loses somebody instead of having to play short-handed and then try to recruit a player later.
One of the 13 recruited players we could have had this year, one, (Oshae Brissett) decided to jump to the pros, (but wasn’t drafted: he signed a free agent contract with the Raptors). This surprised few people because Brissett had been playing like a guy auditioning for the NBA all season. As a freshman he was very aggressive driving to the basket and rebounding. As a sophomore, he kept jacking up three pointers to prove that he is an NBA caliber shooter, (which he is not). That still leaves us with 12 recruited players : 3 centers, 4 forwards and 5 guards. And I think they can all play at this level- not a Sean Williams, Greg Davis or David Patrick, (three guys – a center, a forward and a guard - who famously couldn’t) among them. This will give us plenty of competition for jobs and a great deal of potential depth. I say ‘potential depth’ because your real depth consists of the players who have proven to a coach that they can be an asset to the team in a competitive game plus the number of different positions that can play. I see three guards who could play either guard position, a forward who could play either forward position and another forward who could also play center. That’s potentially 12 + 5 = 17. We’ll not run out of players – or combinations of them – this year. The completion for playing time will be great and JB won’t have to suffer a sub-par performance for very long.
There’s a myth that Boeheim never winds up using more than 6-7 players. The Media Guide has all the numbers back to the 1999 season. The number of players who have played minutes equal to the numbers of games the team played times ten has been: 1999: 8; 2000: 8; 2001: 7; 2002: 8; 2003: 8; 2004: 8; 2005: 8; 2006: 7; 2007: 7; 2008: 7; 2009: 8; 2010: 7; 2011: 8; 2012: 9; 2013: 8; 2014: 7; 2015: 8; 2016: 6; 2017: 7; 2018: 7. JB likes to go with his best guys down the stretch, (almost all coaches do), but he’s flexible. This team should be more like the 2012 team in that respect. I think it will be more of an 8-9 man rotation. And the 3-4 guys behind that aren’t bad, either.
Last year we had the entire starting line-up back from a Sweet 16 team. Normally you’d expect your team to improve in that situation: they are young but experienced players who will get better. The problem is, you are locked into their skill sets: whatever weaknesses you had the previous year are likely still there. Paschal Chukwu was still Chukwu, Tyus Battle still had that hitch in his shot, Marek Dolezaj was still reluctant to shoot, Bourama Sidibie’s knees still hurt, etc. When you add to that an injury to our point guard, (Frank Howard), that limited him most of the season, (and may have been related to his drug suspension on the eve of the NCAA tournament), and a sub-par season by our power forward, (Brissett) and you go from 23-14 to 20-14. It’s long been said that some of Boeheim’s best teams are in years when we are supposed to be rebuilding. One of the reasons is that opportunities for new players or new starters open up and those players will have different sets of strengths and weaknesses and those traits might just add up to a better team than we had the year before. I think that will happen this year.
Meanwhile the rest of the league is also rebuilding. Virginia lost its best three players. Duke lost its three golden boys, Williamson, Barrett and Reddish. They’ve got a good class coming in but not on that level. North Carolina has one starter back and Florida State has the same number. Virginia Tech lost all their starters and their coach, too. A lot of people are favoring Louisville, who went 20-14 last year, same as us. Those were the teams with a winning conference record last season. That’s a lot of possibilities for new players with new talents but a lot of uncertainty to go with it. There’s an opening for Syracuse to move up – if we’re up to it.
The SU team took a tour of Italy during the summer, playing four mostly uncompetitive games against Italian teams. The best SU fans could do watching the team against such completion was to see how the players moved and what skills they had and how they played together. Every player had his moments. Sidbie appeared healthy and mobile and played very well. Quincy Guerrier looked like a man among boys. Jalen Carey had his way driving to the basket. We seem to have a number of shooters. The team as a whole played faster, ran more and used more pressure defense. In past years these trips have been very helpful to young teams and have tended to lead to seasons where we were surprisingly good. The last time we did this, we started out 25-0.
I think this year’s team will be better than the 18-13, 23-14, 19-15, 23-14, 20-14 type teams of recent years. I think they will pass the one test I have decided to apply to Syracuse teams: I want to be curious, not nervous on Selection Sunday. But they are unlikely to be on the level of the 30-5, 27-8, 34-3, 30-10, 28-6 teams we had to begin the decade. At least, not yet.
THE SITUATION
We are now ending a very interesting decade for Syracuse University basketball. The first half of the decade with three teams achieving a #1 ranking and a fourth making the Final Four, (we’ve had five teams in our history get to the top of the rankings and six reach the Final Four and that’s eleven different teams) was a peak in the program’s glorious history. The big issue back then was: “When are we going to win our second national championship?” Instead Duke won their fourth and fifth, Connecticut won their third and fourth, Kentucky won their eighth, Louisville won their third, Villanova won their second and third, North Carolina won their sixth and now Virginia has won their first.
But we were beyond caring about that because we got hit with our second probation and began a series of years where we either weren’t eligible for the NCAA tournament, were not chosen or were barely chosen, to the consternation of the program’s critics. From 2010-2014 we were 149-32, (.823). Since then we are 103-70 (.595). We’ve made a couple of good post season runs: In 2016 we won four games to get to our sixth Final Four but we were over-matched by North Carolina, 66-83. It was not unlike the 1975 run, when we were just a regional program making noise on the national scene for the first time in a decade and got clobbered by Kentucky 79-95. Then, in 2018 we won our way from the “First Four” to the Sweet 16, (three wins), where we nearly bumped off Duke. But we are tired of bubble teams and Cinderella runs. We’re SYRACUSE! We want to get back to where we were early in the decade where we were wondering why we weren’t winning the national championship.
That may take a while. We were not just held back by the probation, which denies you scholarships but also has you recruiting on eggshells, not wanting to get in trouble again. There was the succession plan where Jim Boeheim would have been retired by now and Mike Hopkins would be our coach. But, either Hopkins decided to leave so Boeheim decided not to retire or Boeheim decided he didn’t want to retire so Hopkins left. Mike went back to his native West Coast, where he has been named PAC 12 Coach of the year twice in a row at Washington, where he is 48-22, (.686) in those two seasons and should continue to do very well with recruits like Isaiah Stewart out of Rochester and Quade Green out of Philadelphia, both of whom Jim Boeheim had badly wanted.
People have questioned how well young players relate to the soon to be 75 year old Boeheim. We no longer seem to be in the running for the top recruits any more, (the probation likely has a lot do with that: we won’t do what might be necessary to get them to come here). But most of those recent national champions were not keyed by “one and doners” but rather by veteran line-ups filled with juniors and seniors. We’ve had a lot of guys in recent years who were not the type to carry us to a national title in a year or two but might have been a key part of a championship caliber team if they’d stayed and fully developed their talents here: Donte Greene, Jonny Flynn , Dion Waiters, Jerami Grant, Chris McCullough, Malachi Richardson, Tyler Lydon and Oshae Brissett. Everybody loses players but a lot of those are guys who didn’t pan out and some of them made it big and were lottery picks. We seem to lose the late first round, second round guys who might have become lottery picks had they stayed. The Connecticut, Louisville, Villanova, North Carolina and Virginia national champions held on to those kind of guys.
I think JB may have changed his recruiting strategy because of this. Historically, he has not used the entire compliment of scholarships the NCAA allows, (13) on recruited players, (I use that term because walk-ons can be given scholarships and JB, who was a walk-on himself, likes to do that: Shawn Belbey, a 5-10 guard who will rarely see the court, already has one. He doesn’t want guys who came here expecting to play, sitting on the end of the bench, griping about their status on the team. He prefers about 10 recruited players which gives him enough such players to scrimmage 5 on 5, enough depth for completion for spots and to absorb a reasonable number of injuries, foul trouble and other problems without having to resort to using the walk-ons in competitive situations. That system was severely tested two years ago when we started off with 10 guys, then one never showed up, another left the team after a couple of weeks and a third tore up his knee halfway through the season. We went through the ACC schedule with just seven guys – and all the way to the Sweet 16 where we gave Duke all they could handle.
When Jim was doing his recruiting for the coming season, he had 8 guys who still had eligibility left- and none were going to be seniors. But he went out and recruited 5 new players. That gave him the NCAA limit of 13, with all of them eligible not just for the 2020 season but also for the 2021 season. And yet he continued recruiting for that season, as well, saying that we can assume we’ll probably lose a couple of guys each year that could have come back. I think JB wants the next guys to already be here, learning his system, for when he suddenly loses somebody instead of having to play short-handed and then try to recruit a player later.
One of the 13 recruited players we could have had this year, one, (Oshae Brissett) decided to jump to the pros, (but wasn’t drafted: he signed a free agent contract with the Raptors). This surprised few people because Brissett had been playing like a guy auditioning for the NBA all season. As a freshman he was very aggressive driving to the basket and rebounding. As a sophomore, he kept jacking up three pointers to prove that he is an NBA caliber shooter, (which he is not). That still leaves us with 12 recruited players : 3 centers, 4 forwards and 5 guards. And I think they can all play at this level- not a Sean Williams, Greg Davis or David Patrick, (three guys – a center, a forward and a guard - who famously couldn’t) among them. This will give us plenty of competition for jobs and a great deal of potential depth. I say ‘potential depth’ because your real depth consists of the players who have proven to a coach that they can be an asset to the team in a competitive game plus the number of different positions that can play. I see three guards who could play either guard position, a forward who could play either forward position and another forward who could also play center. That’s potentially 12 + 5 = 17. We’ll not run out of players – or combinations of them – this year. The completion for playing time will be great and JB won’t have to suffer a sub-par performance for very long.
There’s a myth that Boeheim never winds up using more than 6-7 players. The Media Guide has all the numbers back to the 1999 season. The number of players who have played minutes equal to the numbers of games the team played times ten has been: 1999: 8; 2000: 8; 2001: 7; 2002: 8; 2003: 8; 2004: 8; 2005: 8; 2006: 7; 2007: 7; 2008: 7; 2009: 8; 2010: 7; 2011: 8; 2012: 9; 2013: 8; 2014: 7; 2015: 8; 2016: 6; 2017: 7; 2018: 7. JB likes to go with his best guys down the stretch, (almost all coaches do), but he’s flexible. This team should be more like the 2012 team in that respect. I think it will be more of an 8-9 man rotation. And the 3-4 guys behind that aren’t bad, either.
Last year we had the entire starting line-up back from a Sweet 16 team. Normally you’d expect your team to improve in that situation: they are young but experienced players who will get better. The problem is, you are locked into their skill sets: whatever weaknesses you had the previous year are likely still there. Paschal Chukwu was still Chukwu, Tyus Battle still had that hitch in his shot, Marek Dolezaj was still reluctant to shoot, Bourama Sidibie’s knees still hurt, etc. When you add to that an injury to our point guard, (Frank Howard), that limited him most of the season, (and may have been related to his drug suspension on the eve of the NCAA tournament), and a sub-par season by our power forward, (Brissett) and you go from 23-14 to 20-14. It’s long been said that some of Boeheim’s best teams are in years when we are supposed to be rebuilding. One of the reasons is that opportunities for new players or new starters open up and those players will have different sets of strengths and weaknesses and those traits might just add up to a better team than we had the year before. I think that will happen this year.
Meanwhile the rest of the league is also rebuilding. Virginia lost its best three players. Duke lost its three golden boys, Williamson, Barrett and Reddish. They’ve got a good class coming in but not on that level. North Carolina has one starter back and Florida State has the same number. Virginia Tech lost all their starters and their coach, too. A lot of people are favoring Louisville, who went 20-14 last year, same as us. Those were the teams with a winning conference record last season. That’s a lot of possibilities for new players with new talents but a lot of uncertainty to go with it. There’s an opening for Syracuse to move up – if we’re up to it.
The SU team took a tour of Italy during the summer, playing four mostly uncompetitive games against Italian teams. The best SU fans could do watching the team against such completion was to see how the players moved and what skills they had and how they played together. Every player had his moments. Sidbie appeared healthy and mobile and played very well. Quincy Guerrier looked like a man among boys. Jalen Carey had his way driving to the basket. We seem to have a number of shooters. The team as a whole played faster, ran more and used more pressure defense. In past years these trips have been very helpful to young teams and have tended to lead to seasons where we were surprisingly good. The last time we did this, we started out 25-0.
I think this year’s team will be better than the 18-13, 23-14, 19-15, 23-14, 20-14 type teams of recent years. I think they will pass the one test I have decided to apply to Syracuse teams: I want to be curious, not nervous on Selection Sunday. But they are unlikely to be on the level of the 30-5, 27-8, 34-3, 30-10, 28-6 teams we had to begin the decade. At least, not yet.
