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Message: [QUOTE="Niastri, post: 5605304, member: 722"] It was a little hard to get up for this game. Only bad things can happen with cupcakes. When you are supposed to win by 20-25, can you really get excited about winning by more? And a loss or a lackluster win weighs on you as a fan. But they play the games. Mercyhurst is one of the worst teams we play this season, which is saying something. They are the team that loses to teams you never heard of. Their last game, they lost by 33 to Davidson of the A-10. Our earlier games against peer teams to Mercyhurst resulted in big blowout wins for Syracuse. This game looks like Starling's best game of the season to me. He was active everywhere, played acceptable defense, was 2-4 from 3pt range and scored an efficient 15 on 9 shots. He made his one free throw. Syracuse recovered defensively from their disaster vs. Hofstra, holding Mercyhurst to 5-18 (28%), though Mercyhurst has way too many bad three point shooters shooting way too many threes, so it isn't that much below their season average. We kept them in the game with way too many stupid live ball turnovers and 11 offensive rebounds allowed, despite outrebounding the low major by 7. Souare took and made his first shot of the season. He added two free throws to score his first 4 points in Orange. Interestingly, he made a great attempt at posting up at one point, where Kingz with the ball at the left wing could have easily bounced it to Souare for a dunk. Kingz looked surprised at the option and went a different way instead... Souare showed a few things we hadn't seen before. Maybe he is just worse than Kyle, White and Betsey, not actually bad? Speaking of Kyle, at 5:51 he was trying to post up the big slow guy from Mercyhurst. He fumbled the pass, but wound up with it facing the basket at the top of the key. Kyle made a pretty nice dribble penetration to get all the way to the basket, laying it up in traffic. I would love to see him do that against the giant musclebound ACC big men we are going to face in the coming months. The team continued it's recent tradition of giving up a bunch of points late to hurt us in the NET by reducing the margin of victory. We were up 19 points multiple times near the end of the game, but proceeded to allow Mercyhurst 3 of their 5 total threes in the game in the last 4 minutes to lower the margin of victory to only 14. In this era, good teams surge at that moment to turn a 19 point game into a 25 point blowout, and help the NET ranking. We instead, gave mercy to Mercyhurst. In this day and age, a win is not a win. You are graded on your points scored and your points allowed as much as your victories and losses. Giving up 9 unnecessary points when the game is won is stupid and undisciplined, and could cost us an NCAA slot if we persist. Red's teams also tend to let 15 point losses turn into 25 point losses, but we only saw that once this season (when Iowa State pushed their lead from 16 to 31 after we gave up in the second half). All things considered, not a terrible result from a game with no positive outcomes. Bring on Northeastern, where I hope Syracuse pounds my Alma Mater mercilessly. Maybe I'll be able to generate some excitement Saturday. [/QUOTE]

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