With or without respect to Wes Johnson’s tumble against Providence two weeks ago, the Orange had been walking across coals since their triumphant win against Georgetown last month. First, the close call against DePaul, then big second halves propelling the ‘Cuse to wins against the Friars and Bearcat, a near-meltdown against Connecticut, and finally, some comeuppance against the Cardinals on Sunday afternoon.

Behind lackluster efforts from Scoop Jardine, Brandon Triche and an ice-cold day from the field for Johnson, it felt like SU was pedaling a bicycle through cream cheese just to hang around. Andy Rautins played decently, uncorking a couple of big threes, but I feel oddly comfortable saying that there wasn’t one player for the Orange who I would say played well. I think Arinze Onuaku could have proven me wrong, but he wasn’t given many opportunities. Jardine, and to a lesser extent, Triche, seemed too impatient to wait for the bigs to establish position to feed them the ball, thus abandoning the gameplan that often brings SU the most success.

A vast majority of the Orange’s points came in transition, as usual, but the difference was that the number of runouts and fast breaks was much lower than in games past, thanks to Louisville’s press and, once broken, their ability to get set and execute a solid matchup zone.

While some have been quick to lay into Tim Higgins’ officiating, he was hardly the reason SU lost, but I agree with the critics that aren’t sure what was going through his mind when he called an intentional foul on Kris Joseph late in the game. Higgins has reffed nearly 1000 games in his 14 years of officiating (going on 15); while I can’t estimate how many of those have included a team trailing by one or two possessions with less than a minute remaining, I do think it’s safe to assume a good amount, enough to know that the trailing team is going to foul until the game is out of hand.

Additionally, it’s worth mentioning that in the window between the 9:00 and 7:30 marks of the second half, where Louisville took the lead for good, Rakeem Buckles was allowed to camp in the paint for as long as he wanted, and from 6 feet away, Higgins never even started a three second count.

Looking down the schedule, all of a sudden just five games remain in the regular season and SU has a loss going into a two-game roadie against a full-tilt Hoyas team and the high-scoring Friars. if Wes Johnson isn’t healthy, he needs to get there fast and start taking over games the way we saw him take over Madison Square Garden. The next biggest thing, in my mind, is to get consistent guard play from the Jardine-Triche tandem. Their inexperience is starting to show itself – they have a couple of great finishers to go to in Onuaku and Jackson, but they can’t finish if they don’t have the ball.

This entry was posted on Monday, February 15th, 2010 at 12:08 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.