The Downside

[SWC75]

- You knew it would end like this- a game where we couldn’t hit the broad side of a barn. We were 0 for 10 from three point range- our first game without a three pointer since 3/10/95 when we lost to Providence in the BET, (remember Moten being called for 5 seconds while dribbling the ball into the boards right in front of JB?). Hold your crucifix up: That was 666 games ago!!!


- Michael Gbinije’s sneaker came off twice. The first time a guy drove right by him to score a two pointer and the second time a guy got open form three point range and drilled it. A sneaker, a sneaker…our season for a sneaker!!!


- That sneaker aside, where was this Gbinije all year? He was aggressive on both ends, scoring 8 points on 4 for 5 shooting. At one point I noted that he and Christmas were 7 for 9 from the field and their teammates were 6 for 28.


- If you are getting your scoring from your 5th and 6th leading scorer, your offense is not functioning. And when your point guard has to take over and become the whole offense, it’s not functioning, either.


- Trevor Cooney was his own shadow, going 1 for 6 from the floor and 0 for 4 from the field. The killer was when he missed a wide open trey and Khari Price drilled one at the other end to give them a 6 point lead in a low scoring game. The aggressive, confident Cooney we saw early in the season is MIA. Maybe next year.


- Jerami Grant attempted 3 shots in 34 minutes. And he wasn’t getting to the line: 0 for 1 from the foul line. He’d been such a key figure for us and he came up with nothing for his last game of the year.


- The measure of excellence in modern college basketball is the 30 win season. At 25-0 I thought that was a cinch. We might get that in the regular season, as we did two years ago. We not only went 3-6 the rest of the way but two of the losses were at home to losing teams.


- We’ve had a lot of worse teams than this but none more frustrating. I don’t recall a team that had such trouble getting the ball into the basket as this team. At our best we were a marginal offensive team, with one outside shooter, one medium range guy, (neither of whom were very good from those spots this year, at least when it counted), no real inside game and no bench scoring. And we were rarely at our best down the stretch. One good game (Florida State, Western Michigan) led to two awful games, (NC State, Dayton). Don’t give me an “efficiency” rating. I think that’s the product of a slow pace and few turnovers. You have to make plays. That last possession against NC State went into the books as one failed possession, even though we had 6 chances to score. The games were just so painful to watch. Basketball used to be fun. Not this year.


- It’s not just the jump shots. I’ve never seen a Syracuse that was this lousy at making lay-ups. We seemed to let go of the ball too far from the basket and pray it goes in. And some of those missed lay-ups could have been dunks.


- I love a playoff vs. the bowl system but the one good thing about the bowls is that a 6-6 Syracuse team can end the season with a win and carry over the good feeling from that game into the off season. In basketball, it’s like the last moments in Saigon: only one team can get into the helicopter. The rest have their season end in a game like this. I wish a season could end with a strong performance in which we lost to a team that also gave a strong performance but that’s almost never the case. It’s like hoping that one day, when you are very old but feel good, you’ll just go to sleep and not wake up the next morning. Probably not.

 

[OttoMets]

-...I’ve never seen a Syracuse that was this lousy at making lay-ups. We seemed to let go of the ball too far from the basket and pray it goes in. And some of those missed lay-ups could have been dunks.


-...

Yes. Fundamentally lacking.

Probably our fewest number of dunks in a decade or more, too. Not getting easy points makes everything more difficult.

 

[OrangeHoss]

- You knew it would end like this- a game where we couldn’t hit the broad side of a barn. We were 0 for 10 from three point range- our first game without a three pointer since 3/10/95 when we lost to Providence in the BET, (remember Moten being called for 5 seconds while dribbling the ball into the boards right in front of JB?). Hold your crucifix up: That was 666 games ago!!!


- Michael Gbinije’s sneaker came off twice. The first time a guy drove right by him to score a two pointer and the second time a guy got open form three point range and drilled it. A sneaker, a sneaker…our season for a sneaker!!!


- That sneaker aside, where was this Gbinije all year? He was aggressive on both ends, scoring 8 points on 4 for 5 shooting. At one point I noted that he and Christmas were 7 for 9 from the field and their teammates were 6 for 28.


- If you are getting your scoring from your 5th and 6th leading scorer, your offense is not functioning. And when your point guard has to take over and become the whole offense, it’s not functioning, either.


- Trevor Cooney was his own shadow, going 1 for 6 from the floor and 0 for 4 from the field. The killer was when he missed a wide open trey and Khari Price drilled one at the other end to give them a 6 point lead in a low scoring game. The aggressive, confident Cooney we saw early in the season is MIA. Maybe next year.


- Jerami Grant attempted 3 shots in 34 minutes. And he wasn’t getting to the line: 0 for 1 from the foul line. He’d been such a key figure for us and he came up with nothing for his last game of the year.


- The measure of excellence in modern college basketball is the 30 win season. At 25-0 I thought that was a cinch. We might get that in the regular season, as we did two years ago. We not only went 3-6 the rest of the way but two of the losses were at home to losing teams.


- We’ve had a lot of worse teams than this but none more frustrating. I don’t recall a team that had such trouble getting the ball into the basket as this team. At our best we were a marginal offensive team, with one outside shooter, one medium range guy, (neither of whom were very good from those spots this year, at least when it counted), no real inside game and no bench scoring. And we were rarely at our best down the stretch. One good game (Florida State, Western Michigan) led to two awful games, (NC State, Dayton). Don’t give me an “efficiency” rating. I think that’s the product of a slow pace and few turnovers. You have to make plays. That last possession against NC State went into the books as one failed possession, even though we had 6 chances to score. The games were just so painful to watch. Basketball used to be fun. Not this year.


- It’s not just the jump shots. I’ve never seen a Syracuse that was this lousy at making lay-ups. We seemed to let go of the ball too far from the basket and pray it goes in. And some of those missed lay-ups could have been dunks.


- I love a playoff vs. the bowl system but the one good thing about the bowls is that a 6-6 Syracuse team can end the season with a win and carry over the good feeling from that game into the off season. In basketball, it’s like the last moments in Saigon: only one team can get into the helicopter. The rest have their season end in a game like this. I wish a season could end with a strong performance in which we lost to a team that also gave a strong performance but that’s almost never the case. It’s like hoping that one day, when you are very old but feel good, you’ll just go to sleep and not wake up the next morning. Probably not.

Regarding the dunks vs. layups. I have been asking myself that same question all season. Why not go for a dunk every time? Bring back the dunk count. Make sure the dang ball drops!

 

[domestu]

- We’ve had a lot of worse teams than this but none more frustrating. I don’t recall a team that had such trouble getting the ball into the basket as this team. At our best we were a marginal offensive team, with one outside shooter, one medium range guy, (neither of whom were very good from those spots this year, at least when it counted), no real inside game and no bench scoring. And we were rarely at our best down the stretch.

I started going to college games in the Midwest almost sixty years ago and have never followed such a low scoring team before. You have to go back to days when Syracuse was a minor player on the college hoops scene to find a SU team that averaged fewer points per game. Three Cuse teams since 1950 averaged fewer points per game but this is the first one to average under 70 since the 1962-63 season. We averaged just under 68 this year but the numbers have been far lower than that since New Year's.

We were a very marginal offensive team this season. Everyone raved about Tyler Ennis but our other starting guard dished out fewer assists than any starting guard in the Boeheim era. Our point guard was good at creating scoring opportunities in the offensive sets but far too many of our offensive plays ended up being one-on-one situations. Syracuse had 161 more assists last year and every team since 197o when they began recording assists racked up more assists than this squad.

When you throw in our inability to knock down shots from the perimeter, this was a very offensively challenged team. We have had two teams in the last twenty years that made fewer 3s but they were much stronger inside.

With all of our offensive limitations, we still had a season that most schools would die for.

 

[Symphony Steve]

I agree. We went as far as an offensively-challenged team could take us.

Played great D, though, and gave us some indelible moments.

Disappointment shouldn't take away the enjoyment that the team provided us this year. It's not as if we were ranked #1 at the beginning of the year. An imperfect team earned that ranking even though we knew that there was no way they could keep winning every single close game with our offense.

Thanks for a wonderful season.