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Message: [QUOTE="Niastri, post: 5623596, member: 722"] Georgia Tech is a big team. Between 7' 300lb Peyton Marshall and 6'9" 240lb Baye Ndongo, they had two players in their starting lineup bigger than any of our guys that play regularly. They bring in 6'10 240lb Mouhamed Sylla off the bench as well. The first two minutes of game time, Marshall used his superior weight to push Kyle around and got two baskets. I thought immediately we were in for a long day. But then foul trouble for Georgia Tech took over. Marshall got 4 fouls in 7 minutes and Georgia Tech's biggest advantage watched the game from the bench. Sylla was out with an injury, so Georgia Tech really needed Marshall on the court throwing his weight around. Georgia Tech had to go with Cole Kirouac for 13 minutes, as both Ndongo and Marshall had serious foul trouble. Kirouac's 7' of height might be imposing, but his listed 199lb weight is much easier to handle in the post. The tale of this season so far has come down to two things: Donnie Freeman's health and team free throw shooting. Against GT, we made 23-31, or .742 of our free throws, and won the game. It is starting to look like the team is elite at drawing fouls, which is an advantage if you make free throws, and not so much when you are the worst FT shooting team in college basketball. Syracuse seems to have become a near elite team at drawing fouls. On the season, they rank 40th in the country on the number of their possessions that result in an opponent's foul. 30.9% of their possessions result in the other team fouling. Drawing fouls is good for a variety of reasons, but it could be reflective of opposing coaches choosing to foul, knowing we are going to miss at a high rate. While we are 40th in drawing fouls, we are only 163rd in percentage of points scored by free throws. Opposing coaches are getting away with their strategy for the most part. But, eventually teams run out of players if they foul too much. The strategy worked for Clemson, but Georgia Tech lost as a result. I think with Freeman and Kyle in the frontcourt, we will continue to draw a lot of fouls. We just need to make enough. This stat tracked at teamrankings, which is the first time I saw their site. As an aside, Freeman is 5th in attempted free throws in the country at 8.83/game, the national leader is at 9.6. Kyle is at 4.8, Anthony at 4.1 and George at 3.9. All are pretty high rates of drawing fouls, especially when you consider Anthony is a part time player. [URL unfurl="true"]https://www.teamrankings.com/ncaa-basketball/stat/free-throw-rate[/URL] At 16:28 of the second half, Freeman hit a three to put us up 54-34, half of Georgia Tech was already on the bench with foul trouble, and the Orange was rolling. At 14:21, the lead was 58-38. Unlike many previous games with Red Autry coached teams, there wasn't a let down that gave up a big run. But in this case, Georgia Tech depleted by injury and foul trouble, managed a slow widdling of the lead from there. At 3:26, Ndongo made a layup to cut the lead to 5 points, 72-67. Anybody who watches Syracuse basketball had to be thinking about a What loss at that moment. Then, something amazing happened. We made some free throws, and tightened down our defense again. We went on a 10-5 mini-run to close the game in the last 3 minutes. How unlike our team that was... It was nice to watch. Freeman just gives us a ton of things we don't have otherwise. He is a great player, and still has a ton of ceiling. We have been talking about him so long that it is easy to forget he has only played 20 games in his career! He has only played 10 games against high major opponents, 8 last year. His development curve is still that of a freshman in the second half of his season. Yet, against his first two ACC opponents this year, Donnie has gone 22.5ppg, 9rpg, and 2bpg, shooting .500 from 2pt and .444 from 3pt range. He also has been important in driving foul trouble against both Clemson and Georgia Tech. Advanced metrics like DRtg and dBPM suggest he is a very good defender in addition to being far and away our best offensive player. Freeman even read my "offensive rebounds like Chris Bell" jibe and pulled down 3 offensive rebounds against GT... All things considered, you can't be excited about this victory like you want to be. GT stinks and is an expected win, even on the road. But with the way this team has been playing, it is a significant relief to put even a bad conference team down 20 on the road. And when they could have crumbled, our guys managed to hold on and make the end of the game comfortable instead of a nail biter. We have significant reason think things are looking up. [/QUOTE]

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