Opening night is finally upon us – with only three D1 games on the Monday night slate, there will be a lot of eyes on the Orange as they look to get past the LeMoyne loss. SU is matched up against the Albany Great Danes, who had an unimpressive 15-16 record last season in the marginal America East conference.

A win in the first game of the Coaches vs. Cancer Classic would make Jim Boeheim just the 8th coach in NCAA history to record 800 Division 1 victories, and of that group, only Mike Krzyzewski and Jim Calhoun are still active.

Syracuse doesn’t have as much history against Albany as it does against other regional opponents, but the outcome of this game isn’t hard to predict. The two teams have met just five times since 1980, but Syracuse’s 17-point victory in 2004 signifies the smallest margin of victory in those five meetings. The Great Danes are a very young team, with eight freshmen on its roster. They return their two leading scorers from last season in 6′6″ forward Will Harris and 6′0″ point guard Tim Ambrose, who combined for 27.3 points per game.

For Syracuse, the interesting points will be seeing how time is split up between Brandon Triche and Scoop Jardine, as well as how the SU bench asserts itself behind the firmly entrenched starters. Kris Joseph will be the first “big” off the bench, but I’m personally curious to see a pair of shooters in Mookie Jones and James Southerland compete against one another.

If Albany is to stand any chance in this one, they have to do what LeMoyne did – use their small size to their advantage with lots of cuts and hot shooting – but against a Syracuse zone defense rather than the man-to-man, it’s far easier said than done.

This entry was posted on Monday, November 9th, 2009 at 9:30 am by Brian G. . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.