DAYTON, OHIO ? Not once did Kansas steal the ball from a Syracuse player. At the same time, the Orangemen turned the ball over just six times.
Good enough to win? Not when you’re outrebounded by 33 and you shoot 30.4 percent.
| Syracuse | 34 | 24 | 58 |
| Kansas | 39 | 48 | 87 |
“We just didn’t play well on the offensive end,” Syracuse coach Jim Boeheim said after Kansas smashed the Orangemen, 87-58, in an NCAA Midwest Regional second-round game Sunday at the Dayton Arena.
“We’ve got to play well on offense to beat Kansas, that’s the bottom line,” Boeheim continued. “We live or die shooting the ball against the zone because we don’t have a strong inside game. We got good looks the whole game.”
And the ball would not go into the basket.
Syracuse missed 22 of its 27 three-point attempts and made only 21 of its 69 shots (30.4 percent). On the average, Syracuse shot 44.7 percent from the floor.
“I was very frustrated,” said senior Damone Brown, at 6-9 Syracuse’s tallest starter. “Once you start missing you try to do something else. We tried to do other things to step it up.”
Brown, Syracuse’ second-leading scorer and leading rebounder, played all but two minutes and settled for a pair of fives in his rebound and point columns.
Preston Shumpert, the team’s leading scorer, was right on his scoring average (19.5) with a 20-point performance, but Shumpert nailed only a third of his 18 shots. Guard DeShaun Williams also scored 20 points, meaning he and Shumpert scored all but 18 of the Orangemen’s points.
“We’ve had a couple of bad shooting games this season,” Boeheim said, “but never did we miss that many layups. In the first half, we missed four or five layups.”
Then there was the glaring board disparity.
“We knew we’d be outrebounded,” Boeheim said. “What we’ve lived off of is a better turnover ratio. We kept our turnovers down, and got some of our own, but you can’t get outrebounded by 30. You can’t make that up.”
Nevertheless, after falling behind by as many as 17 points in the first half, the Orangemen hit seven of their last nine shots before the break and lagged by only five (39-34) at intermission.
“It should have been a 15-point game the way we played,” Boeheim said. “We were in great position. We were down by five, and it was because of ineptness in terms of scoring.”
Then, the Orangemen returned to the court and shot even worse in the second half (9 of 37, or 24.3 percent). During one stretch, Syracuse missed 11 straight shots. On one deflating possession, the Orangemen had five cracks at a basket and blew them all.
“We didn’t put our heads down,” senior guard Allen Griffin said. “We tried to make something happen.”
Nothing Kansas did from a strategy standpoint surprised Boeheim.
“We knew they’d zone us,” said Boeheim, who concluded his 25th season with a 25-9 record. “We were able to penetrate it like I thought we could, but we didn’t finish very well when we got in the lane.”
All in all, Boeheim couldn’t complain about how the Orangemen did as a No. 5 seed. Boeheim was a bit perplexed, however, about where the Jayhawks wound up in the bracket.
“Kansas is a big, strong team,” he said. “I don’t know how they ended up a fourth seed. I thought they were better than that.”
Three-point goals: 5-27 (Shumpert 3-11, Williams 2-9, Brown 0-1, McClanaghan 0-1, Griffin 0-5). Assists: 12 (Shumpert 3, Griffin 3, Williams 3, Duany, Thues, Celuck). Turnovers: 6 (Williams 2, Shumpert, Brown, Griffin, Duany). Blocked shots: 4 (Celuck 3, McNeil). Steals: 10 (Williams 4, Shumpert 3, Brown, Griffin, Thues). |
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Three-point goals: 7-14 (Boschee 4-9, Ballard 1-1, Harrison 1-1, Hinrich 1-2, Gregory 0-1). Assists: 17 (Hinrich 6, Gooden 4, Collison 3, Gregory, Boschee, Ballard, Kappelmann). Turnovers: 20 (Collison 6, Hinrich 4, Gooden 3, Boschee 3, Chenowith 2, Gregory, Ballard). Blocked shots: 5 (Gooden 3, Hinrich, Chenowith). Steals: 0 |
