Syracuse Basketball: 5 Reasons SU Men Win a Championship

Jim Boeheim

Let’s face it, love him or hate him, Jim Boeheim is a phenomenal coach. Down 15 points to Virginia, he turned the game on it’s head by going to a full court press that early. And although it looked like Virginia was easily beating the press down the court, that was actually the goal. He sped up a team that is the slowest in the NCAA in terms of offensive possessions per game.

If we had continued to play at their pace, there is zero chance Syracuse basketball pulls off that upset. But Boeheim took a gamble and it paid off big time. While Virginia easily broke the press and got to the hoop with ease, they didn’t finish at the rim. A big part of that was Tyler Lydon and his length. Boeheim kept him right at the rim during the press and he was the cause of at least three point blank misses.

That rattled Virginia, and once they were rattled, they started getting careless. They made bad passes, they tried to do too much, and it cost them the game. That was all due to Boeheim and his decision making.

And that’s certainly not the only example of it this tournament. In the first two games against Dayton and MTSU, the first half did not go great for the Orange. They led by just four against Dayton and just two against MTSU. But in the second half, Boeheim turned up the defensive intensity by calling for more traps and more rotations at the bottom of the zone.

Any time the ball went to the corner, two players swarmed the defender and either forced a turnover or a bad shot. Time and time again the subtle changes to the defense were getting the best of teams, and all of that is due to the proper adjustments that Boeheim made during the game.

I think it’s absolutely fair to say that this has been Boeheim’s best coaching job ever. He took a ragtag bunch of individuals and shaped them into a team in about two months. Something that people don’t seem to realize is that even with the poor ending to the season, Boeheim went 19-7 with this group. That’s pretty impressive given the circumstances of serving a mid-season suspension for nine games.

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I also love it because it’s a total $%&# you to the NCAA. Oh what’s that? You’re going to suspend our coach, on a whim, mid-season with four days warning? Yeah, that’s fine. We’ll make the Final Four anyways. Suck it NCAA.

This team is primed and ready. UNC is a great team, as are Villanova and Oklahoma, but at this point I feel like the momentum is on our side. This team has peaked at the right time and they are ready to dominate the next two games. They can smell a championship. They can smell the fear coming from UNC.

Two more games. That’s all. Just two more games to go.