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Message: [QUOTE="General20, post: 90309, member: 724"] First off, I dont think that was a bad performance at all, or a sluggish one. Virginia Tech played well and deserves a lot of credit. In my mind this was a good win played at a high level for this early in the year. If you were like me and switched to watch Kansas and Duke play after the SU game ended, you saw two highly ranked teams that played much more sloppy, and quite frankly, worse than either Syracuse or Virginia Tech. As far as Virginia Tech making some early three's. Syracuse dares teams to shoot from outside early. That is the foundation of our defensive scheme. We extend our D only if the other team proves they can hit them. Virignia Tech hit a few three pointers early, not all of them were defended perfectly, but all of them were from beyond NBA range and none of them were wide open. Give Virginia Tech credit for hitting those shots, but Boeheim figured out what they could and could not do pretty quickly and took away just about any consistent offense they had. Teams that win are teams that have the talent, coaching, and player smarts to adjust. Syracuse showed that against Virginia Tech. As for the press. We didn't press much because we are a crappy pressing team. People equate depth with the ability to press. Its all well and good to have fresh legs, but if our guys are not well suited to press, then its not an effective option no matter how fresh we are. The only team our press has looked good against so far is Colgate, and they are about the least athletic team I have ever seen. Other than that one game, we have looked like a bunch of guys who were recruited to play zone trying to press. Which is, of course, what we are. I think its also a misconception that a press wears teams down faster. Virginia Tech did not have to work very hard to beat our press, and I dont think it would have wore them down, even if we pressed the entire game and rotated our 10 guys in and out constantly. What eventually wore Virginia Tech out was having to execute perfectly for 35 seconds every single possession against our zone which play by play was figuring out how to stop the things they had worked on. For the record, I predict we see less and less of the press as the year goes on. Its a nice change of pace weapon to have, especially when you have a lot of fouls to give (which SU does), so I commend Boeheim for practicing it, but it is not our strong suit by a long shot, and not something that should be relied on for anything but short stretches. I know we are a very highly ranked team, and because of that people expect big wins, but it is very rare to jump on a decent team early and blow them out from start to finish. Virginia Tech came out hot and we came out cold. There is nothing wrong with that, we are going to have cold stretches in most games we play. Most teams we play will get hot for a while. The key is to figure out what needs to be done and execute, SU did that. I am actually much more positive about this team after the Virginia Tech game than I was going into the game. I do not think we are going to blow teams out on a regular basis this year. Not many teams do. I do think we are going to rack up a lot of wins. I saw signs that we can put five guys on the floor at one time who compliment each other well, and can score in half court sets, which is what I think it takes to win it all. In all our previous blow outs, we never showed that. My guess is we look good against Stanford, not blowing them out early, but winning comfortably in the end by about 15. [/QUOTE]

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