Syracuse Basketball: Buddy Boeheim is dropped from Wooden Award list

Syracuse basketball is struggling as a team, and I would imagine that’s the primary reason that senior shooting guard Buddy Boeheim has been left off the mid-season watch list for the 2022 John R. Wooden Award, which honors the national player of the year in collegiate hoops.

The 6-foot-6 Boeheim isn’t having a bad 2021-22 stanza to date by any stretch of the imagination, but the Orange (7-7, 1-2) unfortunately is nowhere close to the Big Dance conversation at this juncture in the present term.

The Wooden Award’s mid-season watch list recently got disclosed, detailing the top-25 players who are deemed the front-runners for this honor for the time being.

Now, it’s important to point out here that even though Boeheim isn’t on the mid-season watch list, he can still ultimately work his way onto the Wooden Award’s national ballot of the top-15 contenders. For that to occur, though, the ‘Cuse has to start winning some games in droves.

Let’s look at how Syracuse basketball guard Buddy Boeheim is faring this campaign.

Boeheim caught fire toward the end of his junior term and played quite well in this past spring’s March Madness, as the Orange went to the Sweet 16.

As such, entering his senior stint on the Hill, there was a lot of hype surrounding Boeheim. He was a pre-season All-American candidate and made numerous lists of the best overall players in the sport.

We previously noted that Boeheim was on the Wooden Award’s pre-season watch list, which featured 50 guys instead of the current 25 players.

At the mid-season point, only two Atlantic Coast Conference players made the cut for the Wooden Award watch list, and both hail from Duke. They are freshman forward Paolo Banchero and junior forward Wendell Moore Jr.

It’s true that some of Boeheim’s shooting percentages are presently below a stanza ago, but in all fairness, his stat line is fairly comparable to 2020-21.

Through 14 games this year, Boeheim is averaging 18.7 points, 3.5 rebounds and 3.6 assists per encounter, according to ESPN. At the time of this writing, his scoring average was in the ACC’s top-five overall.

He’s connecting on 41.0 percent from the field, 33.0 percent from 3-point land and 89.7 percent from the free-throw line.

As a junior, Boeheim tallied 17.8 points, 2.6 boards and 2.6 dimes a game. He hit on 43.3 percent from the field as a whole, 38.3 percent from beyond the arc and 84.9 percent from the charity stripe.

We’d all love for Boeheim’s 3-point shooting percentage in 2021-22 to go up, but let’s remember that opponents are honing in on him. He doesn’t get a ton of open looks.

Yet Buddy Boeheim, to me, is generating points and doing other positive things on the court at a strong clip this season, regardless of whether he’s still in the running for the Wooden Award.