Jeff Walz told his players over and over again to hit the defensive glass hard. If his Louisville squad was going to beat Syracuse, the team couldn’t give up offensive rebounds.

He even identified a key number — 14 — that represented the most offensive rebounds his side could give up if the Cardinals still wanted to win.

‘We kept telling our kids you can’t win if you give up offensive rebounds,’ Walz said. ‘Our goal is to hold them to 14 or less offensive boards.’

With 2:33 remaining, the team had already exceeded that amount by giving up 19. And surprisingly enough, the Cardinals were still in the game. But then it all fell apart.

Trailing by just two at 47-45, the Cardinals gave up five offensive rebounds on one possession. The Orange held the ball for 1:13 in that span and clung to its slim advantage. Ultimately, that 73-second nightmare ended with Walz’s team yielding four free throws. And though Syracuse converted only once, it proved to be enough of a cushion to escape with a 53-45 win in the end.

Doing just enough turned out to be the theme for Syracuse’s offense Wednesday. SU earned arguably its second-best win of the season over Louisville despite shooting just 32.7 percent from the field and 58.3 percent from the free-throw line.

‘We just wanted to reverse the ball, get the ball inside and rely on us making shots,’ SU head coach Quentin Hillsman said. ‘We didn’t want to put ourselves in a position where we had to get fouled to score.’

But in parts of the game, that was the only place the Orange could get any points at all. From the 12:09 mark of the second half to the 7:25 mark, Syracuse was held without a field goal. At the start of that stretch, SU led 35-31. By the end, the lead was still four, 40-36.

Syracuse scored all five of its points in that time from the free-throw line. The team got to the line 22 times in the second half. Louisville only attempted 10 free throws the entire game.

And though scoring a single point at a time is by no means desirable, it was just enough to complement a ferocious Orange defensive performance.

‘I was happy with the looks,’ Hillsman said of his team’s offense. ‘I was more happy on the other end that we didn’t let them score. And that’s the key. When you don’t score and they don’t score and you have a lead, you’re going to be in pretty good shape.’

Senior guard Erica Morrow attributed part of the offensive woes to the complicated defense Walz and Louisville employed. The Cardinals switched from zone to man countless times during the game, always giving the Orange something new to pick apart. Plus, Louisville used a 1-3-1 zone instead of the typical 2-3 zone Syracuse is accustomed to.

Morrow said Walz’s squad even changed looks mid-possession.

‘One thing that Louisville is known to do is that they switch defenses in the middle of defenses,’ Morrow said. ‘So it’s a little tough to read what they were doing, but we still were running our sets and trying to attack. Trying to attack the middle, drive and kick, go to the high-low game and keep getting the ball to Kayla.’

And ultimately, the middle is what the Orange was able to exploit. After a first half in which Iasia Hemingway and Kayla Alexander — SU’s two post players — combined for only eight points, the pair put in 13 in the second half.

Hemingway got a third of her points at the free-throw line, which was a direct result of her work on the offensive glass. She pulled in six errant SU shots. Alexander was the target late in the game, as SU went back to its bread and butter, the high-low attack.

And it was Alexander who sunk the Cardinals on that one key possession late in the game. She got to the free-throw line four times on that sequence and converted the crucial attempt to give the Orange a three-point lead.

‘Unfortunately on three or four of them (key possessions), we defended, but then we give up an offensive rebound,’ Walz said. ‘And now all of a sudden it’s a minute that’s gone off the clock because we don’t box out.’

mjcohe02@syr.edu

 

 

 

Published on February 16, 2011 at 12:00 pm

Contact Michael: mjcohe02@syr.edu | @Michael_Cohen13