SWC75
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Jim Boeheim’s radio show is on Thursdays from 7-9PM on ESPN Radio in Syracuse, which is AM1200 or FM 97.7 on the dial. The show originates from Delmonico’s Italian Steakhouse on Erie Boulevard in Syracuse. The first hour, hosted by Matt Park, the Voice of the Orange, is on their general network. The second hour, which begins with the conference season, is hosted by Gomez, a local radio personality.
You can call into the show locally at 315-424-8599 or nationally at 1-888-746-2873. For Gomez’s portion, use 315-424-8599. Or you can submit questions from this page:
http://cuse.com/sb_output.aspx?form=4
Or on Twitter at mattpark1.
The show can be heard in Syracuse on FM 99.5. It’s sometime simulcast on AM 1200 or FM 97.7. You can also get it on: http://tunein.com/radio/WGVA-1240-s29191/
I will be posting my rough transcript the night of the broadcast focusing on my questions, the team and their last and next games and then a second post the next day on other things that were discussed.
MY QUESTIONS/COMMENTS
First hour:
“Coach, I’d like to con graduate you and the team on securing our 16th win and thus assuring that our streak of consecutive winning seasons at 45. UCLA has the all-time record of 54 straight and that is still in sight. It would be a great tribute to the coaches, players and fans of this program if we could accomplish that.
You made a comment after the Pittsburgh game that you weren’t cornered about the Pittsburgh fans because you’d never seen a fan make a basket. I’m wondering how much the fans have contributed to the success of Syracuse basketball and how much could we contribute to a victory in the Duke game? Is it that the fans have more impact on the home team than they do on the road team? “
Second hour:
“Coach, just a comment here. We finally saw both Kaleb Joseph and BJ Johnson have big games. Fans sometimes get down on young players who are struggling. They talk about wasted scholarships, being “recruited over”, who should transfer, etc. They have to realize that Rakeem Christmas and Michael Gbinije weren’t always the players they are now and that Kaleb Joseph and BJ Johnson and the rest were recruited to come here because they are talented players. If you criticize them it’s not because they don’t have ability but that they aren’t using it. With hard work and maturity and some patience from the fans, those struggling young players could become the Christmases and Gbinijes of future SU teams.”
COACH BOEHEIM
(I have, in some instances, put together statements from different parts of the broadcast on the same subject)
Boston had more snow than Central New York. “They don’t know what to do with it. They’re just waiting for it to melt. The piles of snow were very high. Attendance was down but the SU fans got there.”
“When they double-team Rak on every play, guys will get wide open shots. BJ hit some threes and Kaleb driving the lane broke it open. It’s unusual to get a 14 point win in this league. Our defense was much better. That’s the big key. They weren’t as big so we could get by on the boards, (and thus didn’t need Roberson so much), and they were going to leave BJ open. He made 4 of 12 threes. He’s capable of making maybe 6 of them.” Coaches are never satisfied…
Kevin beat me to it calling in first. (I was like one of those guys who make a run at the three point shooter but too late.) He had just finished JB’s book today. He wanted to know if Jim really remembered all those details or did he have to have someone do some research? “I remember facts but not dates so much. For example I remembered the fan who threw the orange at Patrick Ewing but I didn’t remember what the date was. “
I then got through with my first question. “The (home) crowd can keep you going when you get down. In close games they can unnerve the visiting team somewhat. Sometimes the refs can get caught up in it. But good players like to play in noisy places. There were more Syracuse fans in Boston than Boston College fans. They only had about 5,500 fans. They’re not following basketball up there.”
Jim is very proud of that 45 year streak, “easily the longest in the country”. (Matt mentioned Louisville has 13 such seasons but I don’t know if that’s 2nd – it seems a low number.) He said he was glad to get that 16th win. He’s not thinking in terms of losing all the rest of the games but it will be a very difficult schedule the rest of the way so he was happy to clinch a continuation of the record. “You never know what’s going to happen”. I told him that UCLA held the record with 54 straight and suggested that was in sight. He was excited about that possibility. (The subject of who would be coaching at that point - we’d break the record in 2024-25- didn’t come up.) Matt also noted Jim’s record for 20 win seasons. That’s still possible but will be harder goal to attain.
Matt suggested “We can hang with anybody”. JB: “Sometimes you play a team you can’t beat. Overall we’ve played well. We played about as well as we can against North Carolina and played close to that against Pittsburgh.“ They noted that Sheldon Jeter, who averaged 3 points a game and scored 18 against us, scored 2 points in his next game.
They got to talking about the Duke game and the series that has started. “Last year’s Duke games set the bar very high. We won’t play them twice again for a while. It’s hard to keep a rivalry going when you play them only once. There’s a lot of difference. There’s no building anywhere like the Dome when 35,000 people are there.” Matt noted that there were 27,000 less at Cameron. JB: “It’s like Fenway Park in Boston. Traditionalists like that kind of place. I wish they’d fix the locker rooms, though.” Matt Mentions Georgia Tech put $50 million into their new facility “and the locker rooms are in Alabama”. JB: “It was along walk. At least Clemson had an elevator. “
Duke has “three of the top five freshmen in the country” In center Jahlil Okafor, point guard Tyus Jones and guard Grayson Allen. Quinn Cook is also very good.
Tom in Mohawk wondered if “it would be illegal to create a slush fund to make sure that Kaleb Joseph’s family and friends can attend any game””. Matt suggested that any question about the legality of a slush fund kind of answers itself. JB laughed. “We’d have been struggling if Kaleb got his normal 2 points and BJ doesn’t make those threes. A couple guys step up and it makes a world of difference.” Matt said that Jim had been urging Kaleb to “not go sideways-get to the rim or get the pull-up.” Jim said “You can’t always get to the rim but you can pull up. He not only was really good on offense but also better on defense. Sometimes when you score you play better defense. It’s just human nature.”
Later I called in my second comment. JB: “Sometimes people think I pressure players but if you can’t handle the pressure, you can’t play. If you can’t handle me, you can’t handle 35,000 people and you can’t handle playing at Duke.” He talked about players who weren’t much at the beginning but became good or great players. “I can name 10-15 guys who didn’t play as freshmen or sometimes even as sophomores. Mike Gbinije wasn’t this kind of player by any stretch of the imagination last year. Nobody gets all the recruits right, unless you have 5 McDonald’s All-Americans. Even then, half the McDonalds players don’t become stars. There was one NBA All-Star game with no McDonald’s All-Americans in it. Guys who aren’t rated highly turn out to be good. Jerami Grant didn’t even make all city in a bad year. David Robinson was 6-6 in high school. Rick Barry’s son Jon was 5-11. Both grew 6-7 inches in college.” I added that Michael Jordan was cut from his high school team. JB: “Everybody loves that story. ”Matt asked what Steph Curry was like in high school. “The only thing we were worried about was that he was thin. But he was such a great shooter. If you can shoot like that and handle the ball, you’ll have a good career. “
Trevor Cooney again his hit first shot but had trouble finding the range after that. “He didn’t get the same looks after the first one. Then he missed a couple he usually makes. He opens things up for the other guys. He played a solid game.”
Mike Gbinije is “playing great. He had a couple of strips on defense. He’s pushing the ball upcourt. He got to the basket when nobody stopped him. He’s hitting from outside. He’s probably playing as well as anybody in the league. He’s a better driver. He can cause a lot of problems in the lane.” Matt noted that his shooting percentages in league play are all in the 40’s, (not quite: .492 overall, .490 from the arc and .511 from the line), and found that “hard to fathom”. JB on his new free throw style: “He’s trying something new now and I think it will work.”
“Rak couldn’t get a good shot but he got good shots for his teammates.” “It’s crazy that Rakeem is a finalist for the Wooden award. There’s only a couple of guys in the country playing as well.” The player of the game was Kaleb Joseph. “Mike’s won it a lot. I have to go with Kaleb.” Gomez was surprised that he “took it to the rim”. JB: “He can dunk. The last one was with two hands.”
In the first BC game “Hanlan didn’t score in the first half. If he’d had a normal game, we would have bene tied. A guy like that isn’t going to go scoreless.” Matt said that until he hit those first two shots, BJ had missed 20 of his previous 22 shots: that’s 9%. JB: When he missed those first two I had a feeling he was going to hit 3-4 of them. If he gets 10 attempts, he’ll hit for of them. He could hit 6. Of course the good defensive teams won’t let him get that many shots…it gives them someone else to pay attention to. Coaches don’t like to give up 3’s. Strong teams won’t give up an open shot. ”
Pat in Syracuse, who I think wants to succeed Jim as the SU coach, sent via twitter four screen shots of a
play Duke likes to use against SU, which prompted a technical discussion of strategy that wasn’t easy to follow if you didn’t have his screen shots, (and maybe if you did). It had to do with an “overload to force the center to guard Parker or Plumlee. JB replied that “the center takes Parker and the forward takes the far guy. The opposite guard covers the wing pass and the other guard gets between their two guards while we try to trap the guy in the short corner. He might be open until we send a 6-10 guy and a 6-9 guy to trap him.” Pat said “That’s why you recruit long players.” Frankly, I’m not too worried about covering Parker, who is in the NBA and has a torn ACL.
Pat asked if Duke would double Christmas. “I don’t know. We’ll have to prepare for it but they don’t’ do that as a rule. We practice against double-teams all the time…it will be be Rak vs. Okafor in certain situations.”
I'm up for that.
You can call into the show locally at 315-424-8599 or nationally at 1-888-746-2873. For Gomez’s portion, use 315-424-8599. Or you can submit questions from this page:
http://cuse.com/sb_output.aspx?form=4
Or on Twitter at mattpark1.
The show can be heard in Syracuse on FM 99.5. It’s sometime simulcast on AM 1200 or FM 97.7. You can also get it on: http://tunein.com/radio/WGVA-1240-s29191/
I will be posting my rough transcript the night of the broadcast focusing on my questions, the team and their last and next games and then a second post the next day on other things that were discussed.
MY QUESTIONS/COMMENTS
First hour:
“Coach, I’d like to con graduate you and the team on securing our 16th win and thus assuring that our streak of consecutive winning seasons at 45. UCLA has the all-time record of 54 straight and that is still in sight. It would be a great tribute to the coaches, players and fans of this program if we could accomplish that.
You made a comment after the Pittsburgh game that you weren’t cornered about the Pittsburgh fans because you’d never seen a fan make a basket. I’m wondering how much the fans have contributed to the success of Syracuse basketball and how much could we contribute to a victory in the Duke game? Is it that the fans have more impact on the home team than they do on the road team? “
Second hour:
“Coach, just a comment here. We finally saw both Kaleb Joseph and BJ Johnson have big games. Fans sometimes get down on young players who are struggling. They talk about wasted scholarships, being “recruited over”, who should transfer, etc. They have to realize that Rakeem Christmas and Michael Gbinije weren’t always the players they are now and that Kaleb Joseph and BJ Johnson and the rest were recruited to come here because they are talented players. If you criticize them it’s not because they don’t have ability but that they aren’t using it. With hard work and maturity and some patience from the fans, those struggling young players could become the Christmases and Gbinijes of future SU teams.”
COACH BOEHEIM
(I have, in some instances, put together statements from different parts of the broadcast on the same subject)
Boston had more snow than Central New York. “They don’t know what to do with it. They’re just waiting for it to melt. The piles of snow were very high. Attendance was down but the SU fans got there.”
“When they double-team Rak on every play, guys will get wide open shots. BJ hit some threes and Kaleb driving the lane broke it open. It’s unusual to get a 14 point win in this league. Our defense was much better. That’s the big key. They weren’t as big so we could get by on the boards, (and thus didn’t need Roberson so much), and they were going to leave BJ open. He made 4 of 12 threes. He’s capable of making maybe 6 of them.” Coaches are never satisfied…
Kevin beat me to it calling in first. (I was like one of those guys who make a run at the three point shooter but too late.) He had just finished JB’s book today. He wanted to know if Jim really remembered all those details or did he have to have someone do some research? “I remember facts but not dates so much. For example I remembered the fan who threw the orange at Patrick Ewing but I didn’t remember what the date was. “
I then got through with my first question. “The (home) crowd can keep you going when you get down. In close games they can unnerve the visiting team somewhat. Sometimes the refs can get caught up in it. But good players like to play in noisy places. There were more Syracuse fans in Boston than Boston College fans. They only had about 5,500 fans. They’re not following basketball up there.”
Jim is very proud of that 45 year streak, “easily the longest in the country”. (Matt mentioned Louisville has 13 such seasons but I don’t know if that’s 2nd – it seems a low number.) He said he was glad to get that 16th win. He’s not thinking in terms of losing all the rest of the games but it will be a very difficult schedule the rest of the way so he was happy to clinch a continuation of the record. “You never know what’s going to happen”. I told him that UCLA held the record with 54 straight and suggested that was in sight. He was excited about that possibility. (The subject of who would be coaching at that point - we’d break the record in 2024-25- didn’t come up.) Matt also noted Jim’s record for 20 win seasons. That’s still possible but will be harder goal to attain.
Matt suggested “We can hang with anybody”. JB: “Sometimes you play a team you can’t beat. Overall we’ve played well. We played about as well as we can against North Carolina and played close to that against Pittsburgh.“ They noted that Sheldon Jeter, who averaged 3 points a game and scored 18 against us, scored 2 points in his next game.
They got to talking about the Duke game and the series that has started. “Last year’s Duke games set the bar very high. We won’t play them twice again for a while. It’s hard to keep a rivalry going when you play them only once. There’s a lot of difference. There’s no building anywhere like the Dome when 35,000 people are there.” Matt noted that there were 27,000 less at Cameron. JB: “It’s like Fenway Park in Boston. Traditionalists like that kind of place. I wish they’d fix the locker rooms, though.” Matt Mentions Georgia Tech put $50 million into their new facility “and the locker rooms are in Alabama”. JB: “It was along walk. At least Clemson had an elevator. “
Duke has “three of the top five freshmen in the country” In center Jahlil Okafor, point guard Tyus Jones and guard Grayson Allen. Quinn Cook is also very good.
Tom in Mohawk wondered if “it would be illegal to create a slush fund to make sure that Kaleb Joseph’s family and friends can attend any game””. Matt suggested that any question about the legality of a slush fund kind of answers itself. JB laughed. “We’d have been struggling if Kaleb got his normal 2 points and BJ doesn’t make those threes. A couple guys step up and it makes a world of difference.” Matt said that Jim had been urging Kaleb to “not go sideways-get to the rim or get the pull-up.” Jim said “You can’t always get to the rim but you can pull up. He not only was really good on offense but also better on defense. Sometimes when you score you play better defense. It’s just human nature.”
Later I called in my second comment. JB: “Sometimes people think I pressure players but if you can’t handle the pressure, you can’t play. If you can’t handle me, you can’t handle 35,000 people and you can’t handle playing at Duke.” He talked about players who weren’t much at the beginning but became good or great players. “I can name 10-15 guys who didn’t play as freshmen or sometimes even as sophomores. Mike Gbinije wasn’t this kind of player by any stretch of the imagination last year. Nobody gets all the recruits right, unless you have 5 McDonald’s All-Americans. Even then, half the McDonalds players don’t become stars. There was one NBA All-Star game with no McDonald’s All-Americans in it. Guys who aren’t rated highly turn out to be good. Jerami Grant didn’t even make all city in a bad year. David Robinson was 6-6 in high school. Rick Barry’s son Jon was 5-11. Both grew 6-7 inches in college.” I added that Michael Jordan was cut from his high school team. JB: “Everybody loves that story. ”Matt asked what Steph Curry was like in high school. “The only thing we were worried about was that he was thin. But he was such a great shooter. If you can shoot like that and handle the ball, you’ll have a good career. “
Trevor Cooney again his hit first shot but had trouble finding the range after that. “He didn’t get the same looks after the first one. Then he missed a couple he usually makes. He opens things up for the other guys. He played a solid game.”
Mike Gbinije is “playing great. He had a couple of strips on defense. He’s pushing the ball upcourt. He got to the basket when nobody stopped him. He’s hitting from outside. He’s probably playing as well as anybody in the league. He’s a better driver. He can cause a lot of problems in the lane.” Matt noted that his shooting percentages in league play are all in the 40’s, (not quite: .492 overall, .490 from the arc and .511 from the line), and found that “hard to fathom”. JB on his new free throw style: “He’s trying something new now and I think it will work.”
“Rak couldn’t get a good shot but he got good shots for his teammates.” “It’s crazy that Rakeem is a finalist for the Wooden award. There’s only a couple of guys in the country playing as well.” The player of the game was Kaleb Joseph. “Mike’s won it a lot. I have to go with Kaleb.” Gomez was surprised that he “took it to the rim”. JB: “He can dunk. The last one was with two hands.”
In the first BC game “Hanlan didn’t score in the first half. If he’d had a normal game, we would have bene tied. A guy like that isn’t going to go scoreless.” Matt said that until he hit those first two shots, BJ had missed 20 of his previous 22 shots: that’s 9%. JB: When he missed those first two I had a feeling he was going to hit 3-4 of them. If he gets 10 attempts, he’ll hit for of them. He could hit 6. Of course the good defensive teams won’t let him get that many shots…it gives them someone else to pay attention to. Coaches don’t like to give up 3’s. Strong teams won’t give up an open shot. ”
Pat in Syracuse, who I think wants to succeed Jim as the SU coach, sent via twitter four screen shots of a
play Duke likes to use against SU, which prompted a technical discussion of strategy that wasn’t easy to follow if you didn’t have his screen shots, (and maybe if you did). It had to do with an “overload to force the center to guard Parker or Plumlee. JB replied that “the center takes Parker and the forward takes the far guy. The opposite guard covers the wing pass and the other guard gets between their two guards while we try to trap the guy in the short corner. He might be open until we send a 6-10 guy and a 6-9 guy to trap him.” Pat said “That’s why you recruit long players.” Frankly, I’m not too worried about covering Parker, who is in the NBA and has a torn ACL.
Pat asked if Duke would double Christmas. “I don’t know. We’ll have to prepare for it but they don’t’ do that as a rule. We practice against double-teams all the time…it will be be Rak vs. Okafor in certain situations.”
I'm up for that.
