Gerardo Suero sliced into the left side of the Syracuse zone. As he neared the basket, there stood 6-foot-9 forward Rakeem Christmas to protect the hoop against the penetrating 6-foot-4 Albany guard.

Suero went airborne, leaping directly toward Christmas’ chest. But in midflight, he contorted his body and ducked under the all-encompassing wingspan of Christmas. And as he fell to his right — toward the center of the paint — Suero flung an off-balance shot toward the basket that somehow rattled in off the glass to give Albany an early four-point lead.

‘I told everybody he’s not passing the ball,’ SU guard Dion Waiters said. ‘He was doing some crazy shots on one-on-threes, all this acrobatic stuff in the air.’

Reckless as he may have been, Suero willed his way to a game-high 31 points against the Syracuse 2-3 zone. A relentless attack against the SU defense opened up opportunities for fellow guards Logan Aronhalt and Mike Black to score from the outside. The trio combined for 62 points in the 98-74 loss to the No. 5 Orange on Tuesday and pointed out several key weaknesses in SU head coach Jim Boeheim’s zone.

For the Great Danes to have any shot of pulling an upset, the offense had to start and finish with Suero. The Dominican Republic native found any possible crevice in the 2-3 zone and threw himself at the basket sans caution.

Though he’s played against zone defense all his life growing up in the Dominican Republic, he had never seen anything like the labyrinth presented by the Orange.

‘Oh my god,’ a visibly exhausted Suero said. ‘These guys, they are so long. Their arms are so long I don’t even know. Every time I got to the middle, there were like two or three people playing defense on me.’

Part of the result was six turnovers by Suero, who was stripped in the lane on several occasions. But more often than that, he drew fouls.

With 10:21 remaining in the first half, Suero received a pass in the right corner from center John Puk to break the SU full-court press. He beelined for the basket, attempting to use the rim as a shield for a reverse layup.

The long arms of Fab Melo blocked the shot and clobbered Suero on the follow-through, though the foul was assessed to Brandon Triche. He was slow to get up, but went on to make both free throws.

‘You can do good things against their zone and get a good shot, and it could be punched into the seventh row by a 7-footer who is protecting the rim,’ Albany head coach Will Brown said. ‘So I’m trying to look at did we get the ball where we needed to get to and realize that in our league, no one is going to be there blocking it into the seventh row.’

Suero’s ability to get to the free-throw line was due in part to ‘dumb reach-in fouls,’ as Waiters called them. And though his shots were often blocked by a converging Baye Moussa Keita or Christmas, Suero drew contact with his body to receive a foul call and converted 11-of-12 from the free-throw line.

And like Suero, the Great Danes sharpshooter — Aronhalt — won’t face forwards with 7-foot wingspans launching out at him on every 3-point attempt.

He missed each of his first two attempts from long range as well as a layup from in close, but he responded well from that point forward. Aronhalt connected on 4-of-11 3-pointers, finishing with 20 points.

He made back-to-back 3s in the final six minutes of the first half that drew the ire of Boeheim, who called an immediate timeout when he felt his defenders didn’t extend far enough to contest.

‘We didn’t block as many shots as we do,’ Boeheim said. ‘I think we were a little slow, a little step off tonight. We didn’t do as good a job there as we have been.’

Fortunately, Boeheim said, Aronhalt missed a few open 3s or the game would have been much closer in the first half.

Still, the fact that the two players SU’s defense was supposed to key in on — Suero and Aronhalt — burned the Orange didn’t sit well with Boeheim.

Said Boeheim sarcastically: ‘We did talk in the scouting report about the two guys that were guys we wanted to be careful of and be aware of, and we held them to 51, so that was good.’

mjcohe02@syr.edu

Published on November 15, 2011 at 12:00 pm

Contact Michael: mjcohe02@syr.edu | @Michael_Cohen13