Let’s rewind six days — before leaked brackets and the longest two hours in college basketball history — to a situation that Syracuse and its fans either have or will pretend to have already forgotten.

Trevor Cooney, some 20 minutes prior, missed a fairly open 3 that would have surely made Syracuse an NCAA Tournament team. Instead, the Orange lost to Pittsburgh for the third time this season and Cooney was asked to make his case to the NCAA selection committee to give SU an at-large bid.

He paused. He didn’t take his eyes off the floor of the Verizon Center locker room. He nearly whispered his answer, and the small crowd of reporters pushed their recorders and microphones close to his mouth to have any chance at picking it up.

“I mean if you look at our schedule, we played a tough schedule and we were in every single game that we played,” Cooney said. “A lot of teams, good teams, got blown out a couple times this year, and we were in every single game. We don’t have any … the losses that we have, I mean we have a couple bad ones, but they are all close games.”

On Sunday, Syracuse (19-13, 9-9 Atlantic Coast) was tabbed as a No. 10 seed in the NCAA Tournament’s Midwest region and will face seventh-seeded Dayton (25-7, 14-4 Atlantic 10) in St. Louis. Joe Castiglione, the chair of the NCAA’s selection committee, unsurprisingly cited “quality wins” over Connecticut, Texas A&M, Duke and Notre Dame, when asked how the Orange snuck into the Big Dance. But it’s hard to imagine Cooney’s elevator pitch — that SU competed to the end, or very close to it, of every game this season — not being part of what drew the committee to Syracuse.

Yet once the Orange tips off with the Flyers at 12:15 p.m. on Friday, the fact that it “competes” in every game can no longer help unless it does the only thing that matters this time of year: Finish and win.

“You just do it, I don’t know how to explain it,” said Michael Gbinije back in January when asked what SU needed to improve on to finish games better. “It’s the kind of thing you only explain by doing.”

And because Syracuse has also been struggling to answer that question for most of this season, here are three things that could help the Orange finish games (with Dayton at the forefront of the discussion). These “suggestions” are geared toward the SU offense because Jim Boeheim has more regularly pointed to the offense when games have escaped his team. They are based on season-long observations, and sporadic conversations with players and coaches.

1. Tirelessly work the ball to Malachi Richardson

A lot of Syracuse’s late-game struggles have been rooted in poor perimeter shooting, and freshman swingman Malachi Richardson is both a culprit and solution. Gbinije has been the Orange’s best offensive option all season, but Richardson has the fastest first step on the team and is most capable of going off the dribble when SU isn’t making its 3s. He also has Syracuse’s second highest free-throw rate — Kenpom.com’s way of measuring how often a player gets to the foul line — and high-percentage scoring opportunities at the stripe are crucial in crunch time. Lastly, Dayton head coach Archie Miller favors a lineup with 6-foot-6 Kendall Pollard as his center, and that will make it so the Flyers can switch all ball screens and make it hard for all of SU’s perimeter players to get to the rim. If that is the case Friday, Richardson will have the best chance to find the cracks in Dayton’s tight man-to-man defense.

 

Luke Rafferty | Senior Staff Photographer

 

2. Make centers either play screens or sit on the bench

Going off the above note on Dayton’s small lineup, Flyers’ 6-foot-11 center Steve McElvene is the first off the bench and plays 18.3 minutes per game. Since Tyler Lydon is usually on the court at the end of games, Syracuse runs a four-around-one offense (with four perimeter players, including Lydon, and a big man in the paint) with either Tyler Roberson or Dajuan Coleman in the middle. If Dayton decides to play a “traditional” rim-protecting center at the end of games, the Orange needs to put Roberson or Coleman in dribble hand-off situations to force the opposing center to expose himself away from the basket or sag off and give up and open jump shot to the ball-handler.

 

Liam Sheehan | Asst. Photo Editor

 

The Flyers, for example, can switch ball screens and handoffs at every position when Pollard and Dyshawn Pierre (also 6-foot-6) are their tallest players. But Dayton, like all teams that have played Syracuse’s screen-heavy offense like this, won’t switch screens when McElvene is guarding the screener. With that, a way to get good shots late in games is to attack that center as much as possible by using Coleman or Roberson away from the rim, and teams will either risk yielding open shots or have to bench their biggest guy. If the latter happens, SU won’t be able to use this wrinkle. But it would become much easier to control the paint on both the offensive and defensive end.

3. Don’t be afraid to go really small (at least until it doesn’t work)

To erase a late 12-point deficit in the Orange’s loss to Pittsburgh last Wednesday, Boeheim rolled out a lineup of freshman point guard Frank Howard, Gbinije, Richardson and Lydon, with Coleman and Roberson trading minutes. It was extremely effective — because of a well-oiled full-court press and Howard’s ability to penetrate Pittsburgh’s high-pressure man-to-man defense — and it seems that keeping Trevor Cooney in instead of one of the three big men could form an offensive juggernaut late in games. Even if Cooney isn’t shooting particularly well, his presence on the court eliminates a help defender and creates more space for Howard to create and Gbinije and Richardson to attack closing-out defenders. Yes, SU has often been hurt inside this season. But giving this lineup a try if the offense stalls late could be a low-risk (because you can always change it up at the next whistle), high-reward move.

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MORE COVERAGE:

• Roundtable: Dayton rematch, what SU needs to do to win and Cooney’s legacy
• 3 things Jim Boeheim said at his Selection Sunday press conference
• Breaking down the Syracuse-Dayton matchup

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When asked Sunday to assess his team, currently losers of five of its last six games heading into the Tournament, Boeheim sung Cooney’s tune. He pointed to a close road loss at top-seeded North Carolina, the fact that Syracuse was tied late at Louisville and a close road loss at Florida State to end the regular season, to say that the Orange’s current slide isn’t cause for worry.

“We have maybe one bad loss, but all our losses were close games,” Cooney said after SU was selected to the Tournament field on Sunday. “We were in every single game and not many teams in the country can say that. I think that says a lot about us.”
Surely Cooney wasn’t suggesting that he wants simply being in games to fully define his team, even if that’s a big part of its profile to date. Because now it’s really crunch time and the only thing a close loss can bring is the offseason.

Jesse Dougherty is a Senior Staff Writer at The Daily Orange, where his column appears occasionally. He can be reached at jcdoug01@syr.edu or @dougherty_jesse.

Published on March 15, 2016 at 9:18 am