Syracuse basketball needs Buddy Boeheim to break out of shooting slump

Syracuse basketball senior shooting guard Buddy Boeheim is in a bit of a shooting slump.

To be fair, the 6-foot-6 Boeheim still leads the Orange in scoring, at 18.6 points per game, which is nothing to sneeze at, in my humble opinion. He’s also collecting 3.7 rebounds and 3.7 assists per encounter, according to ESPN statistics. Those are solid numbers.

But as the ‘Cuse (7-8, 1-3) is experiencing a current three-game setback streak, Boeheim has shot the ball poorly in the team’s two most recent losses, by one point at Miami and by three points in overtime at Wake Forest.

According to ESPN, Boeheim connected on 5-of-20 from the field and 2-of-9 from beyond the arc versus the Demon Deacons. Against the Hurricanes, he hit on 2-of-7 from the field and 2-of-6 from downtown.

Guard Buddy Boeheim is a huge key to the Syracuse basketball offense.

To date in the 2021-22 campaign, Boeheim is making just 39.7 percent of his attempts from the field as a whole, along with 32.1 percent from 3-point land and a stellar 90.5 percent from the charity stripe.

While some of those numbers aren’t great, it’s important to provide some context here. For one, opponents have made it clear that their top priority when suiting up against the Orange is to make it impossible for Boeheim to get any open looks.

So it’s easy to sit here and say that Buddy Boeheim has average shooting percentages at this juncture in 2021-22, but he is being swarmed by defenders, and often more than one defender at a time. The shots that Boeheim does take are often highly contested, whether from the perimeter or in the lane.

I give a huge amount of credit to Boeheim for evolving his offensive game over the last few years. Known primarily as a 3-point specialist when he embarked on his ‘Cuse career, Boeheim as a junior and now as a senior has shown that he can hit from the mid-range and take smaller defenders off the bounce to the rim.

One of the issues for Boeheim, or maybe it’s more of a dilemma, is that he’s pretty good at creating his own shot, but I’m not seeing a ton of that from other Orange players.

Without question, guys like junior point guard Joe Girard III and senior forward Cole Swider can step into shots from deep and hit them. But Girard, Swider and others on the ‘Cuse roster aren’t doing a whole lot of creating their own shots, at least from my perspective.

Syracuse basketball head coach Jim Boeheim has echoed those sentiments of late. He acknowledges that Buddy Boeheim isn’t receiving a lot of open looks, and as such missing a percentage of them is understandable.

The elder Boeheim has also said that he’d like to see Orange players besides Buddy Boeheim be aggressive and assertive in looking to make plays of their own. I wholeheartedly agree with Jim Boeheim’s assessment here.