The final outcome of Syracuse’s regular season left many players feeling they needed to atone for their underwhelming performance.

The Orange’s season skewed far from expectations. The campaign ended with a losing record in the Big East, dotted with several blowout losses and surprising defeats.

Yet forward Iasia Hemingway still feels SU can prove a great deal in the Big East tournament, which begins at the end of this week.

‘Finishing 12th in the conference was not what we expected, so going into the Big East tournament we look forward to really showing what we’re capable of doing,’ Hemingway said. ‘We didn’t do it in the regular season, so why not just leave it all out there in the Big East tournament.’

Syracuse (17-13, 6-10 Big East) will begin to try and recover from its poor regular-season showing when it takes on No. 13 seed Providence (13-16, 5-11 Big East) in the opening round of the Big East tournament in Hartford, Conn., Friday at noon. SU players and coaches are looking to the tournament as one final opportunity to right their season and pick up some wins over premier conference opponents in the season’s final stages.

It’s still up in the air whether the Orange will land in the NCAA tournament, Women’s National Invitation Tournament or nowhere at all, but the Big East tournament could dictate which tier Syracuse falls into.

‘As a team we’re pretty much all levelheaded,’ SU guard Carmen Tyson-Thomas said. ‘ … We’re not too excited because I know I’ve been there before and we have no freshmen. We’re just looking forward to getting in there and making some plays and getting some wins.’

The Orange has battled through a tumultuous journey trying to find its identity all season long. After opening the season 11-4, SU began conference play with six losses through its first eight games. But SU was able to get back on track by crushing the Friars 80-54 on Jan. 31. Hemingway scored a game-high 24 points in the win over the Friars, which saw five SU players score in double figures.

The rout marked the start to a better second half of the conference schedule for SU, and the Orange closed out the regular season with a .500 stretch over its last eight games.

But despite the blowout of the Friars earlier in the season, Hemingway said the team’s focus in the tournament can’t be sidetracked by overlooking Providence.

‘The Big East is a great conference, and you can’t go in taking any game lightly, at all,’ Hemingway said. ‘ … We went 23-of-23 from the free-throw line, that was amazing, but we can’t go in automatically thinking we’re going to have a perfect game again because that was a great game we played against Providence.’

Head coach Quentin Hillsman recognizes his team missed some opportunities to pick up wins early in the season, but he’s hoping the improvements Syracuse made in the latter half of the schedule will carry SU forward.

After upending then-No. 21 DePaul and nearly defeating then-No. 15 Georgetown a week ago, Syracuse showed its ultimate capabilities. But the Orange’s inconsistency continued. SU followed two strong performances with a puzzling defeat to Villanova on Monday.

‘We left some games on the table, we all know that,’ Hillsman said. ‘There’s some games if we could have closed out and finished we would probably have two or three more wins at this point. But obviously, when you look forward, you gotta understand what you need to do to close out games and win, and that’s what I’m excited about.

‘I think that we’re playing well right now, we’re not playing bad, so obviously this is our chance to win some games and move forward.’

After foraging to find its identity for most of the season, Hillsman feels his team is playing as well as it has all yearlong. And heading into the Big East tournament, SU has nothing to lose.

‘Well, obviously just going to these tournaments, they can make or break you,’ Hillsman said. ‘… Obviously this tournament is huge for us, and it’s huge for us if we come out, if we play with confidence and if we understand what’s at stake,’

adtredin@syr.edu

Published on March 1, 2012 at 12:00 pm