Quentin Hillsman said he wasn’t worried about his team’s minus-10 rebounding margin Tuesday. The Syracuse women’s basketball coach pointed to another statistic he felt was more concerning: field-goal percentage.

‘We missed so many shots, they got a chance to outrebound us,’ Hillsman said in a phone interview after the game. ‘If you don’t make shots, you don’t win basketball games.’

The fluky statistic the fifth-year head coach pointed to was SU’s shooting: 13-of-51, 25.5 percent from the field. That, in Hillsman’s mind, is what led to Notre Dame’s big rebounding night. And it’s also what led to the No. 8 Fighting Irish’s 71-48 drubbing of Hillsman’s squad Tuesday. The Orange never led, as Notre Dame jumped out to a 13-2 lead and never let SU get within seven.

The game was an abrupt end to Syracuse’s three-game winning streak.

‘We got shots, man,’ Hillsman said. ‘It wasn’t about getting shots, it’s about making them. We just got to make the shots.’

Take away the games of SU’s two post players, Kayla Alexander and Shakeya Leary, and the rest of the Orange shot just 15 percent (6-of-40). The pitiful outside shooting — 2-of-14 from 3-point range — was even worse. Highlighted in it was the goose egg in Elashier Hall’s scoring line. Hall, who led SU in Big East play with 16.1 points per game entering Tuesday, took just three shots in 29 minutes on the floor.

Alexander was the only Orange player in double digits, scoring nearly half of SU’s total points with 19. Notre Dame, on the other hand, put four players in double figures, cruising to a 34-20 halftime lead that quickly increased to a 20-plus-point lead just a few minutes into the second half.

It was only the second time all year SU was held to fewer than 50 points. The first game was against No. 1 Baylor in a 77-43 thrashing in the Bahamas.

‘They’re the No. 8 team in the country,’ Hillsman said, ‘so you’re not talking about a team that isn’t going deep in the Big East tournament and the NCAA Tournament.’

Hillsman said Notre Dame was the more physical team Tuesday. Syracuse’s physicality has come into question on more than one occasion since the Orange began Big East play, with players and Hillsman agreeing the team needs to get tougher.

The head coach said not being physical enough was the reason Syracuse turned the ball over 24 times against the Irish. He didn’t attribute it to sloppy play. Even with Alexander scoring 19 points, the rest of the team wasn’t tough enough in the paint.

‘There was a lot of contact in the paint,’ Hillsman said. ‘We got a couple charges, we got a couple travels, so we just didn’t execute well in the paint.’

Against teams currently ranked in the Top 25, Syracuse is just 1-4, although the Orange does have a win over then-No. 6 Ohio State. The Buckeyes are now actually below SU in the polls, but Hillsman is still confident about his Orange reaching the goal of the NCAA Tournament.

Syracuse’s next game is Saturday at Rutgers, against a team it lost to in the Carrier Dome on Jan. 11. Hillsman knows that for SU to avoid letting Tuesday’s loss snowball into the final stretch of the season, his Orange need to turn it around right away Saturday.

‘That’s the key,’ Hillsman said. ‘You got to come back out to win the next one.

‘Come back out to win the next one, and it all goes away.’

mcooperj@syr.edu

 

Published on February 1, 2011 at 12:00 pm

Contact Mark: mcooperj@syr.edu | @mark_cooperjr