Despite tempered expectations to begin the season, we’ve known how good this team really is going back to Wes Johnson’s coming out party at Madison Square Garden those two nights in late November . Still, if anyone had told me before the season that the Orange would be a one seed, favored in their third game of the NCAA tournament without their starting center, I would’ve done something drastic, like watch a Freddie Prinze Jr. movie or buy a ticket to a Knicks game.

Fast forwarding to the present, SU is in Salt Lake City to take on the Butler Bulldogs in the Sweet 16. While they come from the nondescript Horizon League, Brad Stevens’ troops hold the nation’s longest current win streak at 22 games, including a spotless run through their conference. They come from a mid-major conference, but they aren’t a mid-major team. If you’ve won 30 games, as both Syracuse and Butler have, you’re doing a few things right.

Getting to know Butler, the Bulldogs are a team that goes 8.5 deep, and have a balanced scoring attack with four starters averaging double figures. On the defensive end, they boast the nation’s 10th-highest efficiency rating and despite not having much size outside of Horizon League Player of the Year Gordon Hayward, they hit the defensive glass hard, ranking 23rd in the country in defensive boards per game. Of course, they’ve seldom matched up with the kind of size Rick Jackson, Wes Johnson (who is fresh off a downright clinic against Gonzaga) and Kris Joseph have to offer, so even without Arinze Onuaku, ‘Cuse should be able to handle things down low.

We hear a lot about how tough it is for non-Big East teams to execute against the zone, despite it being Jim Boeheim’s calling card throughout his coaching career. SU should hold their own in the back of the 2-3 because of the aforementioned size advantage, so the bigger challenge will be for Andy Rautins, Scoop Jardine and Brandon Triche to lock down on the perimeter. The Bulldogs have three legitimate three-point threats who average at least 36% from beyond the arc with a considerable sample size, so the guards will definitely have their work cut out for them.

So far in this tournament, the ‘Cuse has easily disposed of its opponents. With the exception of the last six minutes of their first round game, they’ve kept sharply focused on the task at hand. One of the teams best traits, for all the sound fundamentals they display and superb execution of the zone defense, is that don’t let the name or history of the opposing team dictate their approach – it’s the same mindset each time out.

This entry was posted on Thursday, March 25th, 2010 at 9:00 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.