At last offering their fans a chance to relax after closing out a season filled with occasional excitement only to be swallowed up shortly by further disappointment, this year’s season for Syracuse Basketball can really only be described as an “up and down” year.
Syracuse Basketball entered this season with preseason expectations uncharacteristically low for the sixth most winningest men’s college basketball program, failing to draw a top 25 ranking while most predicted them to miss out on the NCAA Tournament in accordance. Tallying up 18 wins beside a 10-10 conference record, the Orange accomplished everything experts expected them to, which frankly was not all that much.
While Elijah Hughes‘s excellence (19 PPG and 4.9 RPG) complimented by Buddy Boeheim (15.3 PPG and 2.2 APG) and Joseph Girard III‘s (12.4 PPG and 3.4 APG) steady growth throughout the season brought some extra noise to the loud house, the team itself, unfortunately, missed the mark, dropping far too many winnable games to ever really propel themselves into tournament contention.
Perhaps the Orange only view this season as a failure due to their program’s prestigious history, as gathering 10 ACC wins might come as a candid accomplishment for any other team. For Syracuse however, any year in which their efforts leave their team’s name absent from tournament discussion categorizes as an undeniable failure.
Aside from an embarrassing 34 point effort against Virginia to commence the season, Cuse generally played well offensively, turning what was once the team’s achilles heal into a genuine strength. But while they turned things around on one end, the Orange struggled on the other. Surrendering the sixth most points per game to their opponents amongst ACC teams, Jim Boeheim’s 2-3 defensive attack seemed less like a weapon this season and instead more like a stubborn pair of handcuffs.
Presumably eager to move on from this season with a new recruiting class set to arrive next year, Syracuse may just wish to just bury this season out back alongside the recently torn down Carrier Dome ceiling. Regardless, we’ll take one last look at the Orange to try to understand where they went wrong.