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Jim Boeheim’s radio show is on Thursdays from 7-8 or 9PM on ESPN Radio in Syracuse, which is AM1200 or FM 97.7 on the dial. The show originates from Shaughnessy’s at the Marriott in Downtown 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:
Submit a Question! - Syracuse University
Or on Twitter at mattpark1 or “askBoeheim”.
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
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, we have a chance to have quite a team next year if everybody comes back and joins with our recruiting class. What are the factors that determine if a player stays or goes? Is it just his draft level or do academic goals, coaching relationships and family desires also have an impact? “
(Yes, this is the question I was going ask a couple of weeks ago when Alan Griffin filled in: I’d like to get JB’s take.)
Second Hour:
“Coach, you have a coaching staff made up of SU alums - players that you coached. Does that serve to insulate us from the types of things that have gone on at Louisville and this FBI probe? I would think that these guys would not want to do anything that would get the school or you in any kind of trouble, so we don’t have to worry about this type of thing here. “
COACH BOEHEIM
(I have, in some instances, put together statements from different parts of the broadcast on the same subject. In recent years they have started out doing one hour shows and then shifted to two hour shows in January. When they do two hour shows. I will do two posts: one on the night of the broadcast on the issues directly relating to the team on the other the next days on other things that were talked about.)
(This one turned out to be just an hour show so I never got a chance to ask the second question. )
Jim wasn’t there at the very beginning so Matt went over the upcoming events: the Clemson game, Senior Day but with a dearth of seniors, a tribute to Lawrence Moten and Rudy Hackett to be honor at the Hardwood Club dinner.
After an early commercial break, Jim was there and they took a call from Liam in Pompey who simply said that we need to beat Clemson and do well in the ACC tournament. This launched Jim into an analysis of where we stand. “It’s different from last year, when we were 18-13 and just missed. This year we could be 19-12. We have 4 road wins and one on a neutral court. Last year we had 2 road wins and none on a neutral court. This year we’ve got 3 quadrant 1 wins and 4 from quadrant 2, (are they in a Chinese restaurant?). Our RPI is #49 and our strength of schedule is in the top 50. We’ve had no bad losses. Oklahoma has had 8 straight road losses. If we beat Clemson and win 1-2 games in New York, we could still get in. We really don’t know what’s going to happen. There will be 6 teams in our league with 8-9-10 losses. A lot of bubble teams have been blown out a lot. We’ve had a lot of close games. We need to play well and see what happens.” Matt suggested that we need to root for a lack of upsets in other leagues, (Jim said that those won’t matter as the winners of one bid leagues will have lost their opportunity if they can’t win their conference tournaments. “It’s more the bubble teams in other conferences.”
On Duke’s loss to Virginia Tech: “Getting Bagley back is big but their perimeter guys were not quite as good. They had to move guys around and go on the road.” They discussed what a great season Virginia is having. They are 8-0 on the road and 15-1 in the league. Everybody else has at least 5 losses.
I then called in my first and only question. Before hand, I took the occasion to congratulate Jim, his coaching staff and his players on delivering a remarkable, if frustrating season. He lost one player to an early jump to the NBA. Another never showed up. Another left after a few games. Another tore his ACL. And most of the rest have bene injured and missed time or games. After Thorpe left, he had a team where only three players had ever played college basketball before this year. Two had played only limited minutes, (Howard and Chukwu), and were coming off injuries. The third, (Battle), had bene the fourth option on the previous year’s team and would now be the focus of the defense. Everybody else was a freshman. The team was not only inexperienced but not physically mature and very thin. And yet, we had won 18 games, 7 in the ACC and still had a shot at an NCAA birth. Viewed in proper perspective, that’s actually quite an accomplishment. I noted that the coach had said that we could play with just 6-7 guys. I made a comment that the Spartans at Thermopylae we very brave but I bet they wished they had a few more Spartans.
JB: “We would like to have had another guy available. Our guys have played through a lot. We’ve played 4 games in 14 days – 40 minute games back to back three times a week is a little touchy. (About his constant underplaying of the minutes being played by his best players): You don’t put the thought in your player’s heads that this is going to be hard. We have played well but it’s taken a little bit of a toll. The biggest thin has bene Paschal and Bourama not being able to jump. They are reaching for balls rather than jumping for them. Marek is in a good positon in some games. In others he’s just outside. He was great in Miami but never got the shots he needed against Boston College. Basketball is a ‘read’ game. Matt is in the same positon.”
I then asked my question about the factors in a player’s decision to go to the NBA. Before I record JB’s response, I’ll copy and paste Alan Griffin’s response from two weeks ago first for comparison::
AG: ““All of the above. (academic goals, family aspirations, coaching relationships and draft status), You just never know what will make a kid stay. It might be academics. It might be coaching relationships. They may want to win a championship. To each his own. There are situations in life that push them out the door. If I had had the opportunity to leave early I would have had to think about it a long time because I loved Syracuse and I wanted to win a national championship.”
JB: “It’s only really draft status. If you feel you could go in the first round and get guaranteed money. If it’s the second round, can you move up? They don’t seem to like Tyus right now but they’d be interested if we had 22-23 wins. We will have more players next year. Elijah Hughes does a lot of things well. He’s a very smart player. He makes plays in practice. We would be better just with everybody coming back. But you never know about next year until it gets here.“
Josh in Boulder asked about the offensive fouls called on Oshae. JB: “the first one was a foul. Frank, Tyus and Oshae are having to do so much they are making 3-4 plays a game we’d rather not have them make. That walk is almost never called. Paschal didn’t even touch the guy on that screen, (laughs). The guy didn’t even know the screen was there. Justin Robinson came down before he threw a pass. (He also mentioned something about a dribble on another play.) They shoot it well but on some of them, we were right there.” Matt mentioned that Bowman had bene 3 of 17 from the arc in his previous four games. Jim said “People have really shot it lately. Duke got away without it due to their big guys. Wake and NC State were both 10 for 13 in the second half. We’ve battled hard. We make mistakes but nobody’s working harder than Tyus and Frank. “
Clemson has won a school record 11th ACC game. “Florida State is not a good road team”. Bonzie Colson is back for Notre dame. He played 21 minutes and had 12 rebounds and 9 boards. “Their guards played well. They can make a good push.” Who should be ACC coach of the year? Tony Bennett at Virginia? Brad Bronell at Clemson? They were supposed to be #13 in the league. JB likes the new NC state coach, Kevin Keatts. “they were also picked really low.”
The SU women had a 16 point lead on Virginia Tech in the third quarter but wound up losing by the same score the men did, (70-85). JB mentioned that they missed their last 18 shots. They were out-scored 5-29 in the fourth quarter. Ugh! JB: “When they shoot it they can beat anybody- except Connecticut. Their point guard is a really good player.”
Pat called in and praised the coach for “staying positive: you can only look at the next game”. He asked about Duke using token pressure to slow us down. He noted that BC seemed to “attack us earlier”. JB: “We have trouble scoring so we have to spread the defense out and move them around. We are playing 3 on 5. They know we are going to dribble a lot and don’t have to come out and guard us. Howard Washington was good against Florida State and we were going to sue the 3 guard offense. It would have helped. When we can get something early, we’ll shoot but it normally takes a while. “
Jim added “I don’t think our fans have ever had a better year. They’ve done more than I can say for us. They’ve been active all year.”
On Lawrence Moten: “he was probably the easiest scorer we ever had. He made it look so easy. He’d have 18 points and you’d think he’s scored 12. He’d hit a jump shot, a pull up, a drive, a tip in. of all the four year Big East guys, including Chris Mullen, he scored the most points. I remember when he first started. We were playing Florida State, who had 3-4 NBA players and we crushed them.” Matt remembered seeing highlights of Moten and how if he couldn’t score all he had to do was to get the ball to John Wallace inside. He wished we could do that this year. JB: When have no inside threat , you have to be really sharp from the perimeter. The biggest tell-tale sign is that our three leading scorers are all shooting less than 50% form two point range. They are shooting about 38% from three point range and about the same from two point range. We’ve never had that before. We are still second in the league in defense or we’d have been blown out quite a few times.” (Tyus Battle is shooting 48.1% from two and 32.3% from three. Frank Howard is 42.2%/34.1%. Oshae Brissett is 35.2%/34.4%.)
Rudy Hackett was a great player for our first Final Four team. It wasn’t as big then as now but it was still a big deal. I was an assistant coach. There was no thought that we could make it but we beat #1 UNC and made a miracle shot against Kansas State. Rudy played in the NBA and Europe. I was there for the final game of John Wooden’s career. A Louisville player who had not missed a free throw all season had a 1 and 1 with about 10 seconds left and missed and UCLA came down and made the shot that won them the championship.” (That was actually in the semi-finals: the Bruins beat Kentucky 92-85 in the Final while we lost the consy to Louisville in OT after Jimmy lee’s shot at the end of regulation took the tour and fell out.”
Matt noted that there’s been some buzzer beaters recently: St. Peters beat Monmouth on one and Miami and UNC traded them.
ESPN seems to be rapidly back-tracking on the story they wrote about Sean Miller. JB: The reporter never heard the tape and there may not even be one. That’s this guys’ career. I don’t know how you make up things like this.”
The Big Ten tourney is in New York but not selling many tickets. “They don’t play there regularly and the Big East teams were all in the Northeast, which made it special.” About our performance in the ACC tourney: “all three games came down to the last possession and we lost all three”. (63-66 to NC State in 2014, 71-72 to Pitt in 2016 and 57-62 to Miami last year, (it was 57-60 with 5 seconds left when Gillon missed a trey and Miami got the rebound and was fouled).
Clemson has “three guards who can score and they are a very good defensive team. Last year they lost a lot of close games and this year they are winning them”
And, with that, Thursday becomes just another night of the week...
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:
Submit a Question! - Syracuse University
Or on Twitter at mattpark1 or “askBoeheim”.
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
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, we have a chance to have quite a team next year if everybody comes back and joins with our recruiting class. What are the factors that determine if a player stays or goes? Is it just his draft level or do academic goals, coaching relationships and family desires also have an impact? “
(Yes, this is the question I was going ask a couple of weeks ago when Alan Griffin filled in: I’d like to get JB’s take.)
Second Hour:
“Coach, you have a coaching staff made up of SU alums - players that you coached. Does that serve to insulate us from the types of things that have gone on at Louisville and this FBI probe? I would think that these guys would not want to do anything that would get the school or you in any kind of trouble, so we don’t have to worry about this type of thing here. “
COACH BOEHEIM
(I have, in some instances, put together statements from different parts of the broadcast on the same subject. In recent years they have started out doing one hour shows and then shifted to two hour shows in January. When they do two hour shows. I will do two posts: one on the night of the broadcast on the issues directly relating to the team on the other the next days on other things that were talked about.)
(This one turned out to be just an hour show so I never got a chance to ask the second question. )
Jim wasn’t there at the very beginning so Matt went over the upcoming events: the Clemson game, Senior Day but with a dearth of seniors, a tribute to Lawrence Moten and Rudy Hackett to be honor at the Hardwood Club dinner.
After an early commercial break, Jim was there and they took a call from Liam in Pompey who simply said that we need to beat Clemson and do well in the ACC tournament. This launched Jim into an analysis of where we stand. “It’s different from last year, when we were 18-13 and just missed. This year we could be 19-12. We have 4 road wins and one on a neutral court. Last year we had 2 road wins and none on a neutral court. This year we’ve got 3 quadrant 1 wins and 4 from quadrant 2, (are they in a Chinese restaurant?). Our RPI is #49 and our strength of schedule is in the top 50. We’ve had no bad losses. Oklahoma has had 8 straight road losses. If we beat Clemson and win 1-2 games in New York, we could still get in. We really don’t know what’s going to happen. There will be 6 teams in our league with 8-9-10 losses. A lot of bubble teams have been blown out a lot. We’ve had a lot of close games. We need to play well and see what happens.” Matt suggested that we need to root for a lack of upsets in other leagues, (Jim said that those won’t matter as the winners of one bid leagues will have lost their opportunity if they can’t win their conference tournaments. “It’s more the bubble teams in other conferences.”
On Duke’s loss to Virginia Tech: “Getting Bagley back is big but their perimeter guys were not quite as good. They had to move guys around and go on the road.” They discussed what a great season Virginia is having. They are 8-0 on the road and 15-1 in the league. Everybody else has at least 5 losses.
I then called in my first and only question. Before hand, I took the occasion to congratulate Jim, his coaching staff and his players on delivering a remarkable, if frustrating season. He lost one player to an early jump to the NBA. Another never showed up. Another left after a few games. Another tore his ACL. And most of the rest have bene injured and missed time or games. After Thorpe left, he had a team where only three players had ever played college basketball before this year. Two had played only limited minutes, (Howard and Chukwu), and were coming off injuries. The third, (Battle), had bene the fourth option on the previous year’s team and would now be the focus of the defense. Everybody else was a freshman. The team was not only inexperienced but not physically mature and very thin. And yet, we had won 18 games, 7 in the ACC and still had a shot at an NCAA birth. Viewed in proper perspective, that’s actually quite an accomplishment. I noted that the coach had said that we could play with just 6-7 guys. I made a comment that the Spartans at Thermopylae we very brave but I bet they wished they had a few more Spartans.
JB: “We would like to have had another guy available. Our guys have played through a lot. We’ve played 4 games in 14 days – 40 minute games back to back three times a week is a little touchy. (About his constant underplaying of the minutes being played by his best players): You don’t put the thought in your player’s heads that this is going to be hard. We have played well but it’s taken a little bit of a toll. The biggest thin has bene Paschal and Bourama not being able to jump. They are reaching for balls rather than jumping for them. Marek is in a good positon in some games. In others he’s just outside. He was great in Miami but never got the shots he needed against Boston College. Basketball is a ‘read’ game. Matt is in the same positon.”
I then asked my question about the factors in a player’s decision to go to the NBA. Before I record JB’s response, I’ll copy and paste Alan Griffin’s response from two weeks ago first for comparison::
AG: ““All of the above. (academic goals, family aspirations, coaching relationships and draft status), You just never know what will make a kid stay. It might be academics. It might be coaching relationships. They may want to win a championship. To each his own. There are situations in life that push them out the door. If I had had the opportunity to leave early I would have had to think about it a long time because I loved Syracuse and I wanted to win a national championship.”
JB: “It’s only really draft status. If you feel you could go in the first round and get guaranteed money. If it’s the second round, can you move up? They don’t seem to like Tyus right now but they’d be interested if we had 22-23 wins. We will have more players next year. Elijah Hughes does a lot of things well. He’s a very smart player. He makes plays in practice. We would be better just with everybody coming back. But you never know about next year until it gets here.“
Josh in Boulder asked about the offensive fouls called on Oshae. JB: “the first one was a foul. Frank, Tyus and Oshae are having to do so much they are making 3-4 plays a game we’d rather not have them make. That walk is almost never called. Paschal didn’t even touch the guy on that screen, (laughs). The guy didn’t even know the screen was there. Justin Robinson came down before he threw a pass. (He also mentioned something about a dribble on another play.) They shoot it well but on some of them, we were right there.” Matt mentioned that Bowman had bene 3 of 17 from the arc in his previous four games. Jim said “People have really shot it lately. Duke got away without it due to their big guys. Wake and NC State were both 10 for 13 in the second half. We’ve battled hard. We make mistakes but nobody’s working harder than Tyus and Frank. “
Clemson has won a school record 11th ACC game. “Florida State is not a good road team”. Bonzie Colson is back for Notre dame. He played 21 minutes and had 12 rebounds and 9 boards. “Their guards played well. They can make a good push.” Who should be ACC coach of the year? Tony Bennett at Virginia? Brad Bronell at Clemson? They were supposed to be #13 in the league. JB likes the new NC state coach, Kevin Keatts. “they were also picked really low.”
The SU women had a 16 point lead on Virginia Tech in the third quarter but wound up losing by the same score the men did, (70-85). JB mentioned that they missed their last 18 shots. They were out-scored 5-29 in the fourth quarter. Ugh! JB: “When they shoot it they can beat anybody- except Connecticut. Their point guard is a really good player.”
Pat called in and praised the coach for “staying positive: you can only look at the next game”. He asked about Duke using token pressure to slow us down. He noted that BC seemed to “attack us earlier”. JB: “We have trouble scoring so we have to spread the defense out and move them around. We are playing 3 on 5. They know we are going to dribble a lot and don’t have to come out and guard us. Howard Washington was good against Florida State and we were going to sue the 3 guard offense. It would have helped. When we can get something early, we’ll shoot but it normally takes a while. “
Jim added “I don’t think our fans have ever had a better year. They’ve done more than I can say for us. They’ve been active all year.”
On Lawrence Moten: “he was probably the easiest scorer we ever had. He made it look so easy. He’d have 18 points and you’d think he’s scored 12. He’d hit a jump shot, a pull up, a drive, a tip in. of all the four year Big East guys, including Chris Mullen, he scored the most points. I remember when he first started. We were playing Florida State, who had 3-4 NBA players and we crushed them.” Matt remembered seeing highlights of Moten and how if he couldn’t score all he had to do was to get the ball to John Wallace inside. He wished we could do that this year. JB: When have no inside threat , you have to be really sharp from the perimeter. The biggest tell-tale sign is that our three leading scorers are all shooting less than 50% form two point range. They are shooting about 38% from three point range and about the same from two point range. We’ve never had that before. We are still second in the league in defense or we’d have been blown out quite a few times.” (Tyus Battle is shooting 48.1% from two and 32.3% from three. Frank Howard is 42.2%/34.1%. Oshae Brissett is 35.2%/34.4%.)
Rudy Hackett was a great player for our first Final Four team. It wasn’t as big then as now but it was still a big deal. I was an assistant coach. There was no thought that we could make it but we beat #1 UNC and made a miracle shot against Kansas State. Rudy played in the NBA and Europe. I was there for the final game of John Wooden’s career. A Louisville player who had not missed a free throw all season had a 1 and 1 with about 10 seconds left and missed and UCLA came down and made the shot that won them the championship.” (That was actually in the semi-finals: the Bruins beat Kentucky 92-85 in the Final while we lost the consy to Louisville in OT after Jimmy lee’s shot at the end of regulation took the tour and fell out.”
Matt noted that there’s been some buzzer beaters recently: St. Peters beat Monmouth on one and Miami and UNC traded them.
ESPN seems to be rapidly back-tracking on the story they wrote about Sean Miller. JB: The reporter never heard the tape and there may not even be one. That’s this guys’ career. I don’t know how you make up things like this.”
The Big Ten tourney is in New York but not selling many tickets. “They don’t play there regularly and the Big East teams were all in the Northeast, which made it special.” About our performance in the ACC tourney: “all three games came down to the last possession and we lost all three”. (63-66 to NC State in 2014, 71-72 to Pitt in 2016 and 57-62 to Miami last year, (it was 57-60 with 5 seconds left when Gillon missed a trey and Miami got the rebound and was fouled).
Clemson has “three guards who can score and they are a very good defensive team. Last year they lost a lot of close games and this year they are winning them”
And, with that, Thursday becomes just another night of the week...
