Syracuse Basketball: 4-star Elijah Moore has 27 points, defeats No. 3 team

Four-star shooting guard Elijah Moore, who was expected to officially sign with Syracuse basketball on Saturday, showed yet again why he’s vastly underrated in the 2024 class.

The 6-foot-4 Moore and former Orange target Ian Jackson, a 2024 five-star guard who is committed to fellow Atlantic Coast Conference squad North Carolina, combined for a whopping 59 points on Thursday night in leading their New York team to a huge victory over the country’s No. 3 high-school squad.

Obviously, it’s super early on in the 2023-24 season in high-school basketball, however, Moore and Jackson certainly made a massive statement in asserting themselves as perhaps the top backcourt duo nationwide.

On Thursday, Moore and Jackson’s squad, the Our Saviour Lutheran School in the Bronx, N.Y., defeated Prolific Prep in Napa Valley, Calif., by a final count of 100-79 in Queens, N.Y., according to various media reports.

In multiple preseason top-25 rankings ahead of the 2023-24 stanza getting underway, Prolific Prep was rated at No. 3 nationally. The Circuit, by the way, had Our Saviour Lutheran at No. 16 overall in a recently published preseason top 30.

Syracuse basketball 2024 four-star commit Elijah Moore balled out versus elite competition.

Our Saviour Lutheran School is operating as JellyFam in the Atlanta-based professional league Overtime Elite. Our Saviour Lutheran’s game against Prolific Prep, though, wasn’t an Overtime Elite encounter, as far as I can tell.

Our friends with the X account The HS Circuit tell us that in the upset of Prolific Prep, Elijah Moore tallied an impressive 27 points, while Jackson was also tremendous, dropping 32 points.

In the wake of this result, Moore earned high praise from numerous national analysts and scouts, including Jonathan Givony, a top NBA Draft analyst at ESPN.

The Prolific Prep roster in 2023-24 includes former ‘Cuse recruiting target Mikey Lewis, a 2024 four-star guard who recently committed to Saint Mary’s out of the West Coast Conference.

Elijah Moore is a top-60 national prospect and a top-20 shooting guard in the senior cycle. He verbally pledged to the ‘Cuse in late January over other finalists Alabama, Arkansas, Miami and Oklahoma State. In recent months, various recruiting experts and scouts have noted that Moore continues to evolve his all-around game beyond that of primarily being a 3-point specialist.

Per college basketball insider Adam Zagoria and others, Moore was set to ink his national letter of intent on Saturday to play for Syracuse basketball next year. He joins four-star power forward Donnie Freeman from Washington, D.C., in the Orange’s 2024 class. The 6-foot-9 Freeman officially signed with the ‘Cuse a few days ago.

In the most recent AAU season, Elijah Moore earned offensive MVP honors while averaging nearly 20 points per game and shooting roughly 46 percent from beyond the arc for the 17U team of the Bronx-based Wiz Kids in the Adidas 3SSB league.

During the 2022-23 season, Moore and Jackson were standout juniors for Cardinal Hayes High School in the Bronx. They have also been AAU teammates with the Wiz Kids.

Elijah Moore has gotten off to quite a mighty start in his senior year with Our Saviour Lutheran.