It took one dribble, one look up court and one flick of his right wrist for Kaleb Joseph to throw a three-quarter-court pass right into the chest of Rakeem Christmas.

Christmas caught it, gathered himself in the paint and threw down a two-handed dunk, which prompted a Holy Cross timeout and set Joseph off.

“Come on, that’s basketball!” Joseph yelled as he high-fived his teammates.

Then the freshman point guard escaped the huddle and stood alone by the Orange’s bench, where he took a quick breather before returning to the court and pushing the tempo some more.

“I think the second half we came out a little slow, we had a few mental lapses and they capitalized off of that,” Joseph said. “So I definitely made it a point to really force the issue and get out and run.”

When Syracuse (5-1) followed Joseph’s lead, it pulled away from the Crusaders (3-1) in a 72-48 win in the Carrier Dome on Tuesday night. Joseph played 35 minutes — which was tied for a team-high with fellow freshman Chris McCullough — and tallied a career high 14 points with seven rebounds and six assists.

And while his four turnovers showed he’s still in the thick of his maturation process, he scored eight of his 14 in the second half and was 5-for-6 from the line down the stretch.

“With a team like this, like Holy Cross, they’re going to pressure you, you don’t just want to sit back and go backward and let them trap you,” SU guard Trevor Cooney said. “You want to attack it. And he did a great job in the second half of just attacking it.”

From the start, the Crusaders played a full-court press, looking to speed up the game.

It was the kind of pressure that hasn’t been too kind to Joseph this season, but by the second half he was beating Holy Cross with its own approach. A minute and a half after finding Christmas from the backcourt, Joseph extended the zone to around halfcourt and got Crusaders guard Justin Burrell to dribble off his own leg and out of bounds.

With under six minutes to play, he rolled off a screen on an in-bounds play, caught the pass and then zipped the ball into Christmas for another uncontested dunk. Then he took a rebound coast-to-coast to draw and foul and finished his day by euro-stepping around Burrell, drawing a foul and polishing off a three-point play with a free throw.

“(Joseph) really stepped up,” Christmas said. “We’re at our best when he’s playing like that.”

In his convincing second-half play were two missed fastbreak layups. Joseph didn’t say he was fouled or unfocused in those moments, instead summing them up with the same two words he yelled after his best play of the night.

“Sometimes that sh*t just doesn’t go in,” Joseph said. “That’s the way it is. That’s basketball.”

Published on November 29, 2014 at 12:48 am

Contact Jesse: jcdoug01@syr.edu | @dougherty_jesse