The 3-point shots continued to rattle in, and Syracuse women’s basketball head coach Quentin Hillsman knew he had to make a change. Playing in its typical zone defense, Syracuse could not stop the hot shooting of Portland State.

The Vikings made seven 3-pointers in the first half, and hit another three shots from downtown in the first nine minutes of the second half during Saturday’s contest. Hillsman called a timeout to change his team’s defense from zone to man-to-man.

The change worked.

Syracuse’s stingy man-to-man defense over the last 16-plus minutes of the game helped propel the Orange to an 82-77 overtime win over Portland State in its home opener Saturday afternoon inside the Carrier Dome. After allowing 59 points in the first 29 minutes of action, Syracuse only allowed 18 points the rest of the way

‘I said at the 11- minute mark that we’re going to play man-to-man the rest of the game,’ Hillsman said. ‘And if we guard them we’re going to win the game, and if we can’t guard them, we’re going to lose. So I just challenged and said ‘Hey, you’re going to guard your man, you’re not going to foul her.’ In the second half, that’s obviously what we did.’

In a first half eerily reminiscent of that against Siena, in which the opposing team came out firing and made most of its shots, Portland State shot 47.1 percent from the floor in the first half and made 7-of-17 3-point shots. The 45 points the Viking scored is the most Syracuse has allowed in a half so far on the young season.

Using crisp, clean passing, the Vikings moved the ball around the perimeter of the Orange’s zone defense to find open looks and connect. Three Portland State players hit 3-pointers in the first half, and two of the players hit three from long range.

‘They were very good and we knew they would be good, but they really shot the ball extremely well the first half,’ Hillsman said. ‘We just had to make sure that we’d continue to plug away, and play hard and be aggressive. They came out and made shots and that made the game tough.’

In the second half, Portland State came out gunning again, hitting three of its first six 3-pointers to take a 59-48 lead with 11:08 remaining. That’s when Hillsman called the timeout and made the switch to man-to-man defense.Portland State’s clean looks disappeared from that point, as did its prowess from behind the arc. The Orange aggressively guarded the Vikings, forcing mostly contested shots in the second half.

The Vikings shot 2-of-12 from long range for the rest of the game, with both 3-point shots coming in overtime. In the last 11-plus minutes of the second half, the Vikings missed all five 3-pointers, and only shot 4-of-22 from the field.

‘They were hitting a lot of 3’s so we had to throw a different look at them and make them change up their offensive a little bit,’ sophomore guard Erica Morrow said.

With its stingy man-to-man defense forcing misses, Syracuse had to get the defensive rebounds off the missed shots to get back into the game. SU had 20 defensive rebounds in the second half, compared to 12 in the first, while only allowing eight offensive boards.

Syracuse used its size (Portland State’s tallest player at 6-foot-3 only played nine minutes) to do the dirty work. For the majority of the second half, both Juanita Ward (6-foot-2) and Troya Berry (6-foot-2) played simultaneously and grabbed key rebounds.

‘I think (we were able to get the big rebounds at the end),’ junior Chandrea Jones said. ‘Coach always says rebounding win games, so we just crashed the boards.’But the rebounds were set up by Syracuse’s man defense.While Portland State did finish 12-of-35 from long range, the key statistic is that the Vikings only made two 3-pointers in the last 16:08, thanks to high-pressure defense from the Orange.

‘Guarding the ball, its no method to it, its just heart, who wants it more,’ Morrow said. ‘Are you going to let the person in front of your score or are you going to get the rebound? And I think that’s when we came together and said, ‘We’re not going to let the person in front of us score and rebound, and we’re going to take this home.”

mrehalt@syr.edu

Published on November 23, 2008 at 12:00 pm