The 2009-10 season was an unforgettable one for Steve Donahue’s Cornell squad. On their way to a Sweet 16 berth, including a tournament game in Syracuse, the Big Red beat Alabama, UMass, Temple, Wisconsin, St. John’s and put a scare into Kansas on the Jayhawks’ home floor.

Once the season ended, however, things changed in a way that is to be expected from successful teams from non-Power Six conferences: The robust senior class led by Ryan Witman, Louis Dale and Jeff Foote graduated. Donahue made a major leap to helm the program at Boston College. Back in Ithaca, in stepped Bill Courtney from Virginia Tech and several players began the transition from bench player to starter. This team is night and day from last season’s squad.

At 2-4, Cornell has lost some close games and gutted out a couple decent, but no one they have played to this point has the firepower of their tough schedule from last season. Despite the non-con sluggishness by SU, Tuesday night’s game against the Orange presents one of the toughest challenges the Big Red will face all season, the other being upstart Minnesota later this week.

Like last season, this edition of Cornell is more comfortable in a game at a slow-to-moderate pace, not forcing themselves into a track meet. They average around 70 possessions in each of their last four games, a rate that keeps them fresh on defense, where they have allowed just 66 points per game. They’ve also let up less than one point per defensive possession in all but one contest so far (a loss to Seton Hall).

The key for SU is to get Cornell running more than they want to with defensive pressure to create turnovers and easy transition opportunities. The Orange will also be able to get ahead by cleaning up on the glass like they should (the Big Red averages a measly 28.5 rebounds per game). However, SU must balance their comfort running with smart decisions from Scoop Jardine, who runs the backcourt. Scoop has shot just 8-37 in his last three games; while SU is trying to find scoring consistency, I’m fairly confident that Jardine putting up 12 shots a game isn’t going to improve the team in the long run. Brandon Triche also needs to continue to be assertive. Against Georgia Tech, he posted his highest scoring total since his 16-point game against Canisius, which came on the heels of Jim Boeheim calling for him to be more aggressive.

In the frontcourt, look for Kris Joseph to become more consistent when matched against undersized 6’4 senior Max Groebe. In the paint, Rick Jackson should have a field day with Adam Wire, who hardly qualifies as a forward checking in at 6’5. While bigger opponents will eventually mitigate Baye Moussa Keita’s effectiveness, Tuesday will not be one of those times. The mismatches across the paint way so heavily in SU’s favor that even Fab Melo should be able to make some kind of positive impact.

After a short absence, I’m back with my belly still in slight recovery mode from Thanksgiving. I hope everyone’s holiday was enjoyable. The Orange definitely helped make mine enjoyable, coming back from Atlantic City with two wins.

After another cold shooting performance on Friday in the just-enough win against Michigan, Syracuse persevered through the ridiculous individual shooting performance that they run into every so often. Saturday night, the role of Kyle McAlarney, Kyle Kuric, Mike Marra or any of a host of piping hot shooters one could insert was played by Brian Oliver. Even when the ‘Cuse paid more attention to Oliver and stretched out the zone, his shots still fell. Once he hit the bench with mild foul trouble, the scales tilted back to normalcy.

The back line was terrific in collapsing on drives and altering shots when the Yellow Jackets’ perimeter game finally cooled off. Georgia Tech shot just 42% in the second half (2-13 on threes), while the Orange offense accelerated to a 61% clip thanks to a transition offense that forced Ga. Tech out of their comfort zone, drawing easy baskets and many a trip to the stripe. Saturday night also gave us a hint about where things stand in the rotation, with SU playing a Power Six conference close in a neutral (ok, semi-home…) environment.

Mookie Jones and James Southerland, after being given a handful of chances to state their cases, didn’t sniff the court. The best eight players at this point – or at least the eight players Jim Boeheim is most comfortable with in a close game – appear to be the five starters (more on a couple of them later), plus Dion Waiters, Baye Moussa Keita and CJ Fair from the bench. The three freshmen shared the court for a good chunk of time and their performance was one that inspires confidence in Boeheim calling their numbers, and confidence in those who follow the team that things could be pretty nice for the next few years.

Waiters provided instant offense with both his driving ability as well as his range, scoring nine points in under five minutes in the first half. Keita, after being so overlooked coming into the fold, has a knack for being in the right place at the right time, and Fair has displayed a high basketball IQ and is getting it done above the rim. Fair’s 22 minutes were the most he’s played all season. Keita is especially noteworthy because his playing time can be attributed to an interesting combination of circumstances – DaShonte Riley’s surgery and Fab Melo’s struggles.

While we know that Riley won’t be a factor this season, SU fans are hoping that Melo can become one sooner rather than later. Unfortunately for him and fans alike, things haven’t gone nearly as they were foreseen three weeks ago. He’s seen the court for just 26 minutes in his last three games after averaging about 15 in his first three. Early in the first half against Georgia Tech, with SU on defense, a pass zipped across the lane with nary an arm leaving Melo’s side to disrupt it, and Boeheim gave a quick hook. It’s evident that he’s lost, and the Professor has a seat next to him at the ready from which to bestow his infinite wisdom on the young Brazilian. But it won’t come easy

Although I predicted that Melo could struggle in the early going, there signs of improvement in this short span of time have been hard to come by, and that’s what has me slightly concerned.  If Melo is still struggling in a month, Rick Jackson has a game where he gets into foul trouble early and the 6’10/250-lb. guys of the conference are phasing out Keita, SU has no reliable option down low. The worst part may be that that’s not all that unrealistic a scenario to imagine.

Lastly, I was very excited by the emergence of Kris Joseph and his confidence. He was outstanding in the second half as SU went on a 20-4 run to extend the lead into double digits. He’s also starting to show some consistency in his jump shot, canning a few treys. In the offseason, his jump shot was a big question mark in his pursuit to become an all-around scoring threat. Now that he’s shown it off, the question now becomes whether he can do it on a consistent basis.

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Well, the third time didn’t do it, as we saw Tuesday night.

Yes, Syracuse is 3-0, but it’s one of the most deceiving 3-0 records you’ll find in the country. The opponents so far don’t resemble the best the world of mid-majors has to offer, but they aren’t doormats in their conferences, either. With all due respect, when you schedule teams like Northern Iowa, Canisius and Detroit at home, a top-15 team should beat them handily.

William and Mary, the nation’s oldest university comes to town on Sunday to tip off the Legends Classic. Take a quick look at the Tribe. They are one of only five D-I schools to have never made the NCAA Tournament; this year’s campaign to pop their Big Dance cherry isn’t off to a running start, as the Tribe have dropped both games so far by 24 points apiece. They turned over four seniors and more than half their scoring production from last season.This should be a walk for the Orange.

Right?

At least time is on SU’s side. Three games in five days, as the Orange just went through, is a flurry and doesn’t leave much time to prepare for what’s next. With a longer layoff, the team has had time to process Jim Boeheim’s curt postgame remarks, recharge the batteries (despite the fact that the season just started a week ago), get in the film room and hopefully tune up some of the frustrations that made for such uneasy viewing.

Not to be lost in the early aggravations are some of the bright spots. The defense is just as stingy as it was last season, something most people didn’t count on with Andy Rautins and Wes Johnson having left for greener pastures. Turnovers haven’t been much of an issue, either – for all of Dion Waiters’ criticisms and considering his skill set coming in, he has yet to give the ball up to the other team. Still, I would gladly trade a couple turnovers a game for some unselfishness and better shot selection.

Conference play may be off in the distance, but a pivotal opponent in #2 Michigan State awaits in two weeks. As Boeheim himself said, this team has to find a lot of answers in a short amount of time. Gradual, yet significant improvement every game between now and then is a must if SU is to prove that the first three games were nothing more than rust and freshmen mistakes.

Once again, Syracuse was all over the place, and though they won by a double-digit margin for the third straight game, the team’s collective performance left me more frustrated than hopeful. Below are just a few of the things that caused me to want to impale my television with a variety of blunt objects:

-SU shot the rock horrendously after the first six minutes of the game. SU tallied a 36.4% field goal clip on the evening and missed a glaring number of open looks and took several bad shots early in possessions.

-Sticking with shooting, the Orange showed that they’re still a long way from answering their perimeter questions, posting a meager 23.3% mark from deep. The blame can be spread evenly among SU’s reserves – Mookie Jones took his obligatory pair of shots in limited time and Dion Waiters forced a few as well. James Southerland hoisted eight threes on the night, making just one. At this point, I’m not sure I want Southerland putting up eight threes in a 40-point blowout, let alone a game that was as close as this one was.

-Kris Joseph fouled out and missed all five of his shot attempts. The ball went right to him on the team’s first few possessions, but he was a non-factor from that point on. I don’t think the team struggles nearly as much as it does Tuesday night if he keeps out of foul trouble, but another factor is that his teammates need to look for him more often. Joseph is also adjusting to getting more attention from opposing teams, but any way you slice it, in order for the Orange to have a successful campaign, he needs to be more of a focal point.

There were also some positives. Scoop Jardine put the team on his back and carried it to victory with a career night. At one point in the second half, he accounted for over 50% of the team’s scoring simply in terms of points. On top of the scoring, he contributed five steals to initiate the transition game and assists to set up his teammates with easy looks. Obviously, the hope is that the Orange doesn’t need a dominating individual performance like Jardine’s night in and night out, but on a team full of question marks and untapped potential, it’s good to know that he has the capability to take over a game.

Jardine wasn’t the only Philadelphia native sticking his chest out. For the second game in a row, Rick Jackson set a career high in rebounds, with 22 on Tuesday. Detroit has some big post players; Eli Holman might be the best big man in the Horizon League. This was not simply a matter of Jackson being able to reach over shorter competition and inflate his stats. His eight offensive rebounds were also pivotal in keeping SU afloat.

On the whole, the Orange did a very good job defensively, as they have all season long.  Jackson was a force down low, Baye Moussa Keita chipped in some quality minutes and Fab Melo avoided foul trouble. The box score doesn’t reflect it, but he did a good job of clogging up the middle. Later in the season, merely clogging up the lane won’t be enough from the big guy, though I think Tuesday night was a nice step in the right direction.

Three games in five days to open the season takes a toll, regardless of the quality of the opponent. SU now gets a break until Sunday’s matchup against William and Mary. Here’s hoping that the team collects itself, spends some time in the film room and makes some marked progress.

In Syracuse’s first two games, we’ve already seen a ton. The team as a whole has alternated between good halves and bad ones. Individually, Brandon Triche, Dion Waiters and Baye Moussa Keita have alternated between irrelevant and productive outings. In a departure from the bipolar performances, Rick Jackson has shown that despite his consistency, he’s looking to improve his production by adding a face-up game to his repertoire. Fab Melo, on the other hand, has shown us very little aside from an ability to get whistled for fouls at a staggering rate.

It took all of two games for Jim Boeheim to criticize the media and his team publicly, the truest sign that Syracuse basketball is here. We’ve heard a lot of talk about how the rotation might go ten deep, but in Boeheim’s mind, that speaks more to how little proven depth there is on the team beyond the four returning starters than it does to the idea that there are 10 players who are good enough to command significant playing time.

Before the season started, the concept of a bench seat was completely foreign to Dion Waiters, who first pledged allegiance to the Orange before he played a single varsity game. Fab Melo had everyone, even the schools who didn’t pursue the Brazilian, fawning over him before he played a varsity game in the US. Both players have been very frustrating in the early going as they get used to the college environment.

On the other end, CJ Fair and Baye Moussa Keita were supposed to be the afterthoughts of the recruiting class, but in the early going, they’ve made the most noise. Fair missed an entire season in high school with a torn ACL and Baye Moussa Keita committed to SU despite being stuck on the Oak Hill depth chart his entire junior year behind a blue-chip recruit in Tiny Gallon (who, coincidentally, is Paul Harris’ roommate at the moment). You always have to consider the competition, but perhaps the fact that Fair and Keita were so overlooked by the media compared to their freshmen peers has something to do with their inspired play over the first two games. With the last of three games in five days coming tonight against Detroit, we’ll get to see for the first time how the younger players answer a public challenge from their coach.

Waiters will get a challenge in Ray McCallum, Jr., a hyped freshman guard who spurned multiple high-profile schools to play for his father at a mid-major. As much attention as McCallum has received, Detroit had a stellar incoming class even before his commitment, with Jason Calliste, LaMarcus Lowe and Nick Minnerath comprising one of the top groups of newcomers in the Horizon League.

On top of their new guys, the Titans, who won 20 games last season, return junior Eli Holman, who shot at an Onuaku-esque 61.4% clip from the floor and pulled down close to nine boards a game in his sophomore campaign. Holman is the focal point of the offense and in terms of size, will be the most even matchup for Fab Melo and Rick Jackson we’ve seen in the early going. Like Syracuse, Detroit has plenty of young talent, but is still searching for what they can expect from their bench. They don’t have quite enough players to make a serious run at Butler’s Horizon League crown, but they should provide a stronger test than Canisius for Syracuse.

Sunday’s game against Canisius had a few wrinkles to it – once again, the Orange separated themselves with a big run to open the second half after sputtering in the opening stanza. Baye Moussa Keita had 15 rebounds in only 17 minutes of action (though the last handful of those rebounds came in garbage time). After Jim Boeheim accused him of not being aggressive on offense against Northern Iowa, Brandon Triche poured in 16 points and wasn’t the least bit gunshy.

Scoop Jardine led the point admirably, dishing out eight assists against just one turnover, and CJ Fair played the last 10:30 or so of the game and displayed his athleticism with a couple nice dunks. But the real story in this one came after the game, when Boeheim called his own team overrated at this early point in the season, citing the lack of bench depth as a key weakness.

Obviously, when SU’s bench goes only two deep as it did last season, and you move both of those players into the starting lineup and replace them with freshmen in addition to marginal contributors in Mookie Jones and James Southerland, the bench is going to be unproven. That’s not exactly a tough thing to figure out. Boeheim may have said that 10 players have a chance to contribute, but with the way they’ve played so far, only seven or eight will ultimately stick in the vaunted rotation.

In the first half, beyond last year’s regulars of Triche, Jardine, Joseph and Jackson, the team got very little out of those who didn’t get significant playing time last year, whether they were newcomers or played minimally as freshmen. James Southerland had an awful game, missing wide-open jump shots; Dion Waiters got a quick hook after making a few selfish plays; being whistled for three fouls in the span of 35 seconds, as Fab Melo was, simply isn’t going to cut it.

Even at this early stage in the season, Syracuse should be smoking a team like Canisius in the first half instead of being down four as they were at one point. Boeheim’s right on target in his assessment of. This should have been a wire-to-wire blowout, but because the bench contributed so minimally, we were left scratching our heads when the first half ended.

The main point to touch on in Boeheim’s evaluation of his team as “overrated” is that he talked about the rankings in an unprovoked fashion, before the media had the chance to answer questions. In following this team over the last several years, I’ve grown accustomed to seeing all the mannerisms and blunt honesty from Boeheim on a consistent basis, but I don’t recall him using a flawed rankings system as part of the root of any of his more outspoken moments (the classic “Overrated Rant,” was in response to an editorial in The Daily Orange). This season, there’s Duke at the top and Michigan State close behind, but you can make valid cases for the next eight or ten teams to be anywhere in the current rankings. We’re looking at a lean year in college basketball, with very few dominant teams and several decent ones. Dare I question the master, but rankings should mean very little to him at this point. On the other hand, maybe that’s the message he’s trying to send.

It could have been meant more as a response to some cockiness from the underclassmen. You have Mookie Jones saying the coach needs to let him out of his cage more often, Dion Waiters trying to win a starting spot in 15 minutes a game and the rest of the bench players doing all they can when their numbers are called to not be the odd man out of the rotation come conference play. Look at a fast break led by Waiters, Jones and Fair compared to one led by Jardine, Triche and Joseph and you’ll see a very frantic and sloppy style of execution. The determination is very easy to see in this bunch, which I like, but I’m not sure all of them realize that rotation spots are not won and lost in two games, an impression I got from watching both games this weekend.

Still, no one expects this team to coast with a polished rotation from day one, so if the ancillary contributors need to be knocked down a peg or two in the early going for the long-term benefit of the team, I’m all for it. It will definitely be interesting to see how Boeheim’s comments resound not only in tomorrow’s game against Detroit, but over the course of the non-conference schedule as the rotation gets whittled from 10 to 7.

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After a sloppy first half that saw the score tied at 2-2 with as much as 13:45 left in the first half, the Orange slammed on the gas with a 45-point second half outburst on the way to a 68-46 blowout of Northern Iowa Friday night.

Kris Joseph looked like he was thinking too much about the pressure of being a leader in the first half, forcing some bad shots and ending the first half with just one point. But the second half was a completely different story, as he scored the team’s first five points in the span of 70 seconds and ended his evening with 14 points, including a couple three-pointers.

Rick was Rick, also scoring 14 points and stuffing the stat sheet with seven rebounds, four assists, two steals and two blocks. He showed off a new jumper to complement a growing arsenal of post moves. His senior leadership in the frontcourt will be huge for SU this season as Fab Melo and Baye Moussa Keita take the time required to get acclimated to Jim Boeheim’s system.

And it will definitely take some time. Melo was saddled with foul trouble all night, though it’s worth pointing out that no fewer than two of the five fouls whistled on him were questionable. He was pensive for most of the night as a result and had an otherwise non-descript debut.

As a direct result of Melo’s foul trouble, Keita got more playing time than I think a lot of SU fans expected, and maybe more than Keita  himself expected. Like Melo, he looked lost and fouled out, but the Senegalese frosh had a great sequence in the second half where he made a jumper and had a nice block on the Panthers’ next possession that sent SU in transition at a tempo that they’d been wanting to push all night. In the frontcourt, I’m not sure there’s as much depth at the moment as there are simply extra fouls to give, but that assessment can and should change as the season wears on.

Moving on to the guards, the backcourt was something of a mixed bag. Scoop Jardine had a terrible 0-8 shooting night, but he has enough experience and maturity to not get bogged down by one bad game. Brandon Triche played the most out of anyone on the Orange, but had a very quiet evening. Boeheim mentioned that he wants to see more aggression from Triche, and I have to agree. He had a layup taken away on a charge call, so perhaps that got in his head a little too much and led to him mostly deferring for the rest of the game.

On the other end of the attacking spectrum, there’s Dion Waiters.

Waiters provided instant offense for SU, from the perimeter as well as on the drive. He may take a few shots outside of the flow of the offense, but I really like what he brings to the table. His defense, originally viewed as something of a weakness coming in, wasn’t noticeably bad and will only get better.  After the game, Waiters said some things to the effect that coming off the bench for the first time in his life is a humbling position for him.

I believe Waiters is good enough to start, and it wouldn’t be the least bit surprising to me if this time next month SU fans are embroiled in a debate over who should start between Waiters and Triche with Jardine primarily running the point.

There’s a quick turnaround with a Sunday afternoon game against Canisius, an opponent pegged to finish in the bottom half of the MAAC. The Golden Griffins haven’t finished above .500 since 2001, but have improved by four or five wins over the last two seasons. The player to watch for is senior guard Julius Coles, one of the conference’s best scorers and a preseason All-MAAC selection.

To wrap things up, the milestones keep rolling in for Jim Boeheim. Friday night’s win, #830, moved him into a tie with Jim Phelan for fifth on the all-time Division-I coaching wins list.

Enough exhibitions, enough speculation, it’s time for the good stuff to begin. Whereas previous season openers have paired the Orange with a regional opponent (a la Siena or Albany), this season’s first game will match SU with one of the major stories of last season’s NCAA Tournament. Ben Jacobson’s Northern Iowa Panthers stunned #1-seed Kansas in the second round with a 69-67 upset that sent the Jayhawks home two weeks before they had planned to leave. The 60 combined wins between Syracuse and Northern Iowa last season are the most in the country for this year’s slate of season openers, and both teams finished 30-5. The main difference is that while UNI’s Sweet 16 finish signified its ceiling, ‘Cuse’s Sweet 16 finish signified disappointment. Read the rest of this entry »