All Syracuse could do was keep shooting. Though Siena’s goaltender, Tom Morr, was playing phenomenally, SU’s shots had to find the back of the net eventually. The offense just had to keep firing away.

‘We had 52 [sic] shots. Some good, some bad,’ SU attack Tom Palasek said. ‘When a goalie is playing that great, you have to just keep shooting.’

Finally, the offensive persistence paid off, and Syracuse ultimately shot its way to a win.

Palasek finished the game with a team-leading five points to help send No. 1 Syracuse (15-1, 6-0 Big East) to a 10-4 win over unseeded Siena (13-5, 5-1 Metro Atlantic Athletic) in the first round of the NCAA tournament. For the entire first half, the 4,096 inside the Carrier Dome watched an unexpected defensive battle, as the Orange took shot after shot with little success. But Syracuse overcame its poor shot selection and Morr’s stellar performance with a stretch of four straight goals in the second half to give SU the win.

The Saints came into the game with a simple defensive plan: pack the inside of the Orange’s offensive zone and yield only long shots from the outside. Siena executed that plan perfectly for the first half.

It forced Syracuse to return to its offensive ways from early in the season, where it took long shots from the outside that ended up wide of the cage or sailed high over the top. Inaccurate attempts from too far out produced easy saves for Morr, who finished with 19 in the game. SU took 31 shots in the first half but only got the ball past Morr four times.

‘We were giving him confidence there,’ Palasek said.

The Saints held the Orange scoreless for nearly 23 minutes from the second quarter into the third. But once SU broke through the Siena defense with 4:17 left in the third, it sparked the offense.

Syracuse midfielder Josh Amidon broke the drought when he shot low into the cage for his team’s fifth goal of the game. The Orange would add a second goal before the end of the third quarter and two more in quick succession to open the fourth.

‘We were struggling there with our shots,’ Amidon said. ‘Once we got that one, everybody was a little upbeat more and we kind of got our goals that we needed. We got the ball around a bit more.’

That meant shooting low into the net and aiming for areas where Morr wasn’t able to get down on time to make the stop. When the Orange shot high, Morr had little trouble making the save.

What gave SU the win was increased patience. It passed the ball around the zone and began to take high-percentage shots.

By the end of the game, the Orange had peppered Morr with 51 shots but only had 10 goals to show for it. Numbers that Syracuse head coach John Desko found surprising and unusual.

‘Normally, when Syracuse has that many shots, there’s going to be a few more points on the scoreboard,’ Desko said. ‘So, I think it was a combination of their goaltender playing pretty well. We went wide a number of times on our shots.’

The low success rate led to frustration for the Orange on the field. Morr said he could tell that as the struggles wore on, the SU shooters were taking longer shots on poor angles. But once Syracuse scored that fifth goal, the tide started to turn in its favor.

The Orange went up 6-2 when Steve Ianzito scored with nine seconds left in the third quarter on an assist from Jeff Gilbert. Ianzito cut in toward the crease and received a pass from Jeff Gilbert that created a catch-and-shoot opportunity. Ianzito’s tally gave SU a four-goal lead that seemingly locked up the win.

Syracuse tacked on scored four more goals in the fourth quarter, while the Saints could only muster two in a soft comeback attempt.

With just under four minutes left to go in the game and the score at 9-4, the high-fives and hugs began to take place on the SU sidelines. For what seemed like the first time in the entire game, the Orange could breathe easy.

After several weeks of fluid and effective offense, the Siena game was step backwards. But in the end, SU did enough to advance to the quarterfinals.

Said Amidon: ‘Overall, we did what we needed to do.’

cjiseman@syr.edu

Published on May 15, 2011 at 12:00 pm

Contact Chris: cjiseman@syr.edu | @chris_iseman