On the scoreboard, the 85 points that Syracuse let up in its win over Washington Friday night looked like another indictment of what has been a sub-par SU defense.

After all, the 85 points is a total that Syracuse only allowed twice last year.

Defense has emerged as Syracuse’s biggest concern on the young season. The Orange has allowed 77 points per game this year, nine more than the 68 points it let up per contest last season. In the search for a solution, SU has utilized both man and zone defenses this season, with neither proving consistently effective.

Yet it was a span of stingy man defense during the first half of Friday’s game that helped Syracuse take control of the game, sparking a 13-0 run and giving SU a lead it wouldn’t relinquish.

The Orange hopes to build off that brief defensive flash tonight when it hosts Massachusetts at 7:15 p.m. (ESPN Classic) in the Carrier Dome. The Minutemen (4-1) come into the game averaging 88.4 points per game, including 23 per game from senior forward Gary Forbes.

‘I thought we got off to a slow start and then after a few minutes, we went man-to-man, and I thought we did a good job defensively,’ head coach Jim Boeheim said after the Washington game. ‘We got some fast break opportunities because our defense was good for about 10, 12 minutes. We probably played as well as we could.’

To be more exact, Syracuse’s best defensive stretch of the season lasted five minutes. At the 10:38 mark of the first half, Syracuse found itself down 25-18 in part because of a porous 2-3 zone defense it had opened the game with. Out of a media timeout midway through the half, Syracuse switched to a man-to-man defense.

Washington wouldn’t score another point until five minutes later at the 5:30 mark, as SU raced out to a 13-0 run and never trailed again. The Orange forced six turnovers during the sequence, three of those steals. Syracuse’s defense helped to spring its offense the other way.

Overall for the game, Syracuse forced 19 turnovers by the Huskies and tallied 11 steals.

Many of Syracuse’s players are still unaccustomed to the zone. Most high school teams utilize man-to-man defenses, and the switch to man seemed to help SU find a comfort zone.

‘Sometimes in zone defense you can get lost,’ Flynn said. ‘You can fall asleep because you’re guarding an area. With man-to-man defense, you gotta pick your man up. You’re still active in it.

‘I gotta get out of my mind that zone is a bad defense, which I used to think in high school. I gotta buy into what Coach Boeheim thinks. He’s been doing it for a long time.’

Early this season, Syracuse was forced to quickly abandon its zone when it fell into a first-half hole against Fordham. The Orange played man defense for the final 35 minutes of that game, allowing a regular season-low 63 points.

Despite pockets of success, any success in either defense has been fleeting so far, and Friday night was no different. Shortly after the second half’s start, Syracuse switched back into the zone defense that had been so poor in the beginning of the game.

‘Our zone was terrible in the beginning. Awful,’ Boeheim said. ‘We started in the second half, and we’re getting some bad fouls early. So we went back into the zone. The zone was really good there for a while. Then we finally broke down. They got inside a little bit.’

Yet it was the Orange’s defense that opened the door, and its persistent offense that refused to relinquish the lead.

With a team that scores as much and as quickly as Syracuse does, teams are bound to put up points. But there’s little doubt Boeheim will be expecting more of what he saw for five minutes against Washington as the season goes on – regardless of which defense SU uses.

‘I think in spots, our man-to-man I think has been good,’ Boeheim said. ‘We’ve worked hard on it. We’ve spent most of our time in practice on man-to-man. We anticipate playing man-to-man. But the zone is something that we need as well. We need both defenses, really.’

Published on November 27, 2007 at 12:00 pm