It’s quite fitting, actually. In a de facto tournament sponsored by a line of sports video games, SU took their title matchup in the 2K Sports Classic and made it look like just that – a video game. Before Friday night’s blowout of UNC, the 4th straight by SU to open the season, where else could you find a 22-1 run over eight minutes against the 4th ranked team in the country? Additionally, where else could you find lines like Andy Rautins’ final tally of 11 points, 7 rebounds, 7 assists, and 7 steals, and Wes Johnson’s 16 first half points?

SU stormed out of the gate in the first half with an 8-0 run, and just when it took UNC the remaining 17 minutes to finally take the lead going into halftime, it was lost and gone forever just seven seconds into the second half. The Orange was a white-hot 43% from beyond the arc, thanks largely to another fantastic outing from Wes Johnson, who turned the ball over just once.

Despite the outstanding individual performance, the ‘Cuse displayed another balanced scoring effort, with four other players tallying double figures. A lot of people thought this team would be starved for offense beyond Johnson, Onuaku and Jackson. It turns out that nervousness may have just been xenophobia over not knowing how Scoop Jardine and Brandon Triche would perform, in addition to some warranted anxiety over Andy Rautins’ streakiness.

Speaking of Rautins, the guy oozes ballsiness. Rolled ankle? Who cares? He’ll just go 7-10 from long range next night out. Rolled that ankle again? What ankle? He takes the ball away, sits down for a couple seconds and make a crisp outlet pass to Kris Joseph. This team plays infinitely better on both ends of the floor with Rautins on the court than without him.

After the Cal game, I posited that one thing to keep an eye on was how playing time was divided between Brandon Triche and Scoop Jardine.  Triche started, but again, Scoop played more. I came away from Friday’s game a little more impressed by Triche than I had been. He had a great drive resulting in a 3-point play, but aside from that I didn’t see him forcing anything, which was a good sign. I think Triche will be kind of all over the place for awhile; it seems as though he’s still getting used to being told he isn’t a primary option on this team and his chief job is to open things up for his teammates.

Lastly, I have to point out that once again, SU was outrebounded. Part of it is AO still recovering; he looked fine last night in a fast-paced game, but his leaping ability is still coming along. Mostly, though, I see too little boxing out, too much knocking the ball around off the glass, and not enough tearing the ball away from the reach of the opposition. It’s hard to see this being a problem against an opponent like Cornell next week, but when it comes to rebounding, I’d like to see the team value the ball a little more than they have been because they’ve been pretty good in transition.

This entry was posted on Saturday, November 21st, 2009 at 1:09 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.