Syracuse Basketball: How Did We Get Here?

It’s a tough time to be a Syracuse basketball fan. This year’s roster is a mess, and the reasons go back farther than you think.

After another loss last night – this time an overtime defeat at the hands of a Clemson team the Orange led by four with under a minute to play in regulation – it continues becoming more and more clear just how poorly assembled this year’s roster is. But what’s behind the jumbled mess that Jim Boeheim and Mike Hopkins have to work with in 2015-2016?

Believe it or not, you can really trace this year’s mess back to the 25-0 start back in 2013-2014, and the ensuing classes and decisions made by the players Boeheim brought into the program. That year’s team was never supposed to be that good, that early, and it obviously came plummeting back down to earth with a disappointing end to the season. It was too late, however, and the damage was done in terms of roster attrition, as Tyler Ennis gained far more hype than could have been expected, as did Jerami Grant. Both players left school earlier than Boeheim, Hopkins, or anyone else could have anticipated, and that was just the beginning of the roster slowly falling apart, leaving this year’s team in the hole it’s currently digging.

There are a lot of reasons for the struggles this year’s team is facing, so let’s make that abundantly clear right now. There’s no legitimate post presence, there’s little to know true point guard play, there’s a complete lack of depth, and to top it all off, the team lost all contact with its head coach for a full month thanks to an NCAA investigation, and a punishment that was abruptly changed, in terms of its timeframe. That’s a lot for any program to overcome, and we haven’t even touched on the scholarship reductions, which played a huge role in some of the shakeups to this year’s roster – including playing one of the primary roles for Syracuse missing out on a recruit who could have solved the team’s biggest problem.

But let’s back up for a moment, because another of those issues is tied to the fast start to the 2013-2014 campaign. When Tyler Ennis was signed, he was expected to be a two year player, at a minimum, and in all likelihood, Boeheim fully anticipated having the natural point guard for at least his junior season. That would have been this season, by the way. Instead, Ennis was a far more effective freshman point guard than anyone could have guessed, and parlayed his early, impressive performances into becoming a first round NBA Draft selection. That put the Orange in a pretty massive hole, as the roster was simply not built to lose the floor general so soon. Remember, at the time, Ennis was the only true point guard on the roster.

That brings us to Kaleb Joseph, the maligned sophomore point guard who has basically moved out of his apartment on South Campus and permanently into the doghouse in Boeheim’s backyard. Despite assurances that his game had seen major improvements over the summer, we simply haven’t seen enough of Joseph on the court this year to notice any real difference. Over the summer, Boeheim decided that Michael Gbinije was the answer at point guard, planting Joseph firmly on the bench. Matters got worse when Boeheim declared that had Frank Howard been a year older, he’d have started at point guard last season over Joseph. Keeping in mind that Joseph has been mentally berated since arriving on campus, that couldn’t have been good for him to hear. He’s regressed into his shell and now looks more terrified than ever when he’s on the court, a timid player whose time at Syracuse is, in all likelihood, going to be coming to an end this year. It’s hard to imagine a scenario in which Joseph sticks around for a junior season in which he’ll almost certainly be relegated to the bench again, particularly with a dynamic guard like Tyus Battle being added to the mix.

But it’s hard to put a lot of blame for the current point guard woes on Joseph. He was never supposed to be on the floor as a freshman, and that was the start of his downward spiral. Ennis was supposed to be at Syracuse, continuing to run the show and allowing Joseph a year to grow into the position and learn from the savvy Canadian.

Losing Grant after the athletic forward blew up during his sophomore year also set Syracuse back, though it’s hard to imagine he wouldn’t have jumped to the NBA after his junior year anyway, meaning he likely wouldn’t have been on the Syracuse roster this year (which would have been his senior season, otherwise). But one more early entrant seriously undermined Syracuse’s roster makeup, and that’s Chris McCullough. The talented, if at times frustrating, 6-foot-10 forward would have been an ideal piece for the Orange this year, giving the team another big, athletic body in the post and keeping Tyler Lydon from having to play the center position. For all of the things Lydon does well, manning the middle of the 2-3 zone is not one of them, for a variety of reasons.

And really, it’s the post that’s been hurting this Syracuse team more than anything else this year, and unfortunately, the biggest obstacle in maintaining the quality of play down low – not to mention anything remotely resembling depth – is the NCAA. Thanks to those scholarship restrictions and the investigation, which loomed over the program all last fall and winter, the Orange missed out on center Thomas Bryant, a 6-foot-10 kid from right down the road in Rochester. The fierce rebounder and shot blocker would have been precisely what the doctor ordered, but he specifically mentioned the NCAA probe being a major factor in his decision to shun his home-state Orange in favor of heading to Indiana.

The NCAA also played a major role in another post player who would have helped tremendously this year: Moustapha Diagne. The 6-foot-8, 235 pounder from Senegal by way of New Jersey would have played an early and immediate role given the makeup of this year’s team, and his rebounding and shot blocking prowess would have helped enormously. Unfortunately, the NCAA – which decided it wasn’t in the organization’s “wheelhouse” to investigate courses offered by North Carolina – deemed it well within its jurisdiction to question courses Diagne took as a high school freshman in Africa. The NCAA dragged its feet for so long with its investigation into Diagne’s African transcripts that the forward was forced to enroll in a junior college in order to keep his Student Visa, which he’d have otherwise lost without being enrolled in an institution of higher learning.

Next: Syracuse Basketball Loses in OT to Clemson

Both the NCAA investigation and Diagne’s transcript issues were, unfortunately, impossible to predict, and each delivered a major blow to the Syracuse basketball program. Between the early defections of players like Ennis and McCullough and unforeseen circumstances like the one with Diagne, a large, crucial portion of the roster was lost, leaving Boeheim and Hopkins to pick up the tattered pieces of what remained of a roster and try to fit them together despite the obvious holes.

And now, here we are. A poorly constructed team with numerous glaring weaknesses, some of which could hardly be deemed “avoidable” by anyone paying close attention to how things have played out. At this point, the season is all but lost. We will see what happens when Jim Boeheim returns to the sidelines, and if the team that beat UConn and Texas A&M earlier this year will ever emerge from the shadows, but the outlook seems awfully bleak.

Things can start going wrong quickly for a college basketball program, at least on the surface. But sometimes, as in the case of this year’s Orange basketball team, the seeds of disaster were planted before any of us knew to look.