NEW YORK — In a sloppy consolation game, Syracuse beat Iowa 66-63 in the 2K Classic in Madison Square Garden on Friday evening. Here are a few quick thoughts from the third-place game.

1. Enjoy this

By this I mean Chris McCullough. Because if he hasn’t already, pretty soon he’s going to figure that he can be getting paid millions of dollars to do what he’s doing right now.

He’s got plenty of growing to do, sure, but in both games he looked like Syracuse’s most comfortable player underneath the Madison Square Garden lights. Even his misses looked good against California and in each matchup he showed a varied enough skill set to be playing at the Garden in an NBA uniform next season.

He finished with 20 points and 10 rebounds and a late steal that helped the Orange seal the win.

2. Christmas plays, Christmas wins

It won’t always be that simple, but Syracuse is straight-up dependent on its senior big man for points. He gets the gall and goes straight up every time and he’s athletic enough that if he’s not scoring he’s getting fouled.

He worked himself into some foul trouble again Friday, but came back on with four fouls with about five minutes left and stayed in the game.

Christmas was tossed to the floor on a held-ball tie-up with Adam Woodbury with 1:55 remaining, but kept his composure before hitting the front end and missing the back end of a 1-and-1 with 5.8 seconds left.

3. A veteran kind of game

Trevor Cooney didn’t look very good against Iowa. He never looked happy with himself, especially shooting — 41.6 percent from the field —  and passing out of the press where had a pair of turnovers. But he fought back the Iowa run with a short back-door layup with 1:19 remaining and made sure the Hawkeyes final, desperate shot was nothing more than a baseball throw that fell closer to the sideline than the basket.

Published on November 21, 2014 at 7:30 pm