‘War’ starts a little after 5 p.m. for Syracuse most days during the week.

That’s when, a little more than an hour into practice, the players scrimmage five-on-five. The starters make up one side, and the first five off the bench — Dion Waiters, Mookie Jones, C.J. Fair, James Southerland and Fab Melo — usually make up the other team.

And to Waiters, who runs the point for the second team, ‘war’ is the best way to describe it.

‘We battle in practice,’ Waiters said after SU’s 107-59 win over DePaul on Saturday. ‘We want to get better — and I want to get better — at the end of the day. So when the second group comes on and we’re playing against Scoop and them — the starting five — we go hard.

‘It’s a war out there.’

The Orange got a lot more of that these past two weeks, when it had five days to prepare for a game at Georgetown and a week for the game against the Blue Demons on Saturday.

The time off was important for multiple reasons, most of them obvious. But almost every member of SU expressed how important the breaks were between games.

That was because Syracuse displayed a rejuvenated, in sync and, at times, perfected style of play Saturday against DePaul. In the largest margin of victory in Big East conference history, the Orange secured a double-bye in the upcoming Big East tournament in what was easily its most impressive performance of the season. And that should bode well for a team that looked so good coming off an obscene amount of rest Saturday.

‘We go to New York with a good thing — the double-bye,’ SU head coach Jim Boeheim said. ‘It didn’t work out too well last year. You’re going to play a team that is coming off a good win and gain confidence from that. We’ll see what happens when we get down there.’

Granted, SU looked rejuvenated against a DePaul team that obviously doesn’t take lessons from Charlie Sheen. So let’s talk about the stats Boeheim starts to bring up — because they are not in Syracuse’s favor. Since the league instituted the double-bye two years ago, higher-seeded teams have struggled.

The teams that receive double-byes are 7-6 overall the past two years. The quarterfinal round, especially, has been a toss-up.

Syracuse, of course, was a lower seed two years ago when it knocked off Connecticut in the legendary six-overtime thriller. Last year, three of the four top seeds were knocked off in the round.

But from watching the past two wins for this SU team, it’s evident the added rest and practice time were the two things that contributed most to the Orange’s recent dominance.

‘A week can either hurt you or help you,’ SU forward Kris Joseph said. ‘And in our case, I think it really helped us.’

Specifically with respect to the win over the Blue Demons, the week between games helped Syracuse get in sync offensively. That was something it failed to do most of the time in two impressive wins at Villanova and Georgetown last week. Those games were won on the defensive end of the floor.

Lessons from the time off showed Saturday as the Orange excelled in both its steady transition attack and its half-court offense. It showed when Jackson zipped seamless line-drive passes to Waiters in the transition attack. It showed for the freshman Waiters, when he zigzagged his way through the Blue Demons’ defense for 12 points and three assists.

And it showed for the entire Orange offense as Boeheim played all 17 players on his roster. In a balanced attack, six players scored in double figures. Fair — who used the time off to rest an injured ankle — went for 11 on 4-of-4 shooting and 3-of-3 from the free-throw line. Melo came through with perhaps his best game of the season, scoring 10 on perfect shooting and grabbing six rebounds.

Now Syracuse has that extra day before the Big East tournament starts. More importantly, thanks to the last two weeks of work, SU appears to be hitting its stride at exactly the right time.

‘When you finally get a chance to go out there and play,’ Waiters said, ‘it’s all out. You take everything you learn from practice and the hard work you put in. And it’s starting to pay off.’

Brett LoGiurato is the sports editor at The Daily Orange, where his column appears occasionally. He can be reached at bplogiur@syr.edu.

Published on March 6, 2011 at 12:00 pm