Jim Boeheim turned to the Carrier Dome bench, raised his eyebrows and stuck both his arms out behind him. His suit jacket fell off obediently and he grabbed it with his right hand. He faced the bench, pinwheeled the jacket and, with Syracuse forward Matthew Moyer ducking away on the left and director of basketball operations Kip Wellman ducking away on the right, Boeheim flung the cloth into his chair. The technique on Boeheim’s suit-jacket strip-and-spike was flawless, wasting no movement. It was as if he had practiced.

“We left the guy open for about his sixth 3,” Boeheim said in explanation. Then, he chuckled. “That’s enough. I think that’s my limit, when we leave a guy open for about six 3s. I guess that was it.”

The dejected, de-jacketed Boeheim marched a few feet up on the sideline in his white dress shirt and pleaded for his team to play bigger on defense, particularly against Pittsburgh’s Parker Stewart. Syracuse (13-6, 2-4 Atlantic Coast), to the relief of its coach, overcame the freshman guard’s career-high 23 points on seven 3-pointers with a run late in the second half that stamped out pesky Pittsburgh (8-11, 0-6) and delivered a 59-45 escape on Tuesday night. The push, fueled by guards Tyus Battle and Frank Howard, helped Boeheim side-step the first five-game losing streak of his career and finally create the distance Syracuse was never able to generate as well as predicted.

Pitt was winless in conference play, never coming closer than 14 points in any of its losses, had lost 10 players from last year’s team and was without its best player on this year’s team, Ryan Luther, due to a recent season-ending injury. The Panthers started four freshmen and a sophomore junior-college transfer. Vegas listed Syracuse as 17-point favorites and the beat writer who covers Pitt full-time said the Panthers didn’t “stand much, if any, chance” to pull off an upset in the Dome.

Yet, for about three-quarters of the game, the Panthers seemed on the cusp of doing so.

“When you lose some games in a row, you lose a little confidence in your shooting,” Boeheim said, referring to his own squad. “Pittsburgh was smart, they went back inside and just made us shoot a few.”

The Orange struggled to separate itself from the league’s worst team all night and shot 43.1 percent overall. Pitt’s unexpected resiliency showed early with Stewart’s 3-pointers and, in the first half, SU even broke out the press the earliest it has this season.

That pressure produced results against Virginia and St. Bonaventure, but SU had used it too late for meaningful effect. This night, however, the Orange used it early, but Pitt sliced through the pressure on the first possession and, though it missed, the Panthers grabbed three consecutive rebounds. Boeheim didn’t use the press again.

Pitt’s pressure came on the glass, where the Panthers garnered extra chances to catch up to a Syracuse offense that tried and failed for 30 minutes to build a lead greater than seven points. Battle seemed not himself, scoring six points in the first half. The television broadcast attributed it to Battle apparently being sick.

“I have no idea where that came from,” Battle said. “I’m fine.”

But with 9:46 to go, Syracuse itself seemed anything but fine as the Panthers had shaved the lead down to two. That’s when Syracuse’s two most reliable scorers took over. Howard banked in a floater. Battle drilled a 3-pointer from the wing. Howard converted an and-1.

Ball movement and extra spacing generated those looks, the same factors freshman Oshae Brissett credited with stirring life in Syracuse’s stagnant offense on Jan. 9 in its loss to Virginia when the Orange scored 61 points on the nation’s top-ranked defense. Brissett saw this game as a building block from that one.

“The second half we moved the ball really well,” he said. “We didn’t just swing it side-to-side but penetrating and kicking it back out and dumping it down low. Even if we don’t convert, we’re able to get the ball up on the basket and getting the chance to the offensive rebounds. That’s a big step we took, moving the ball inside and out.”

After struggling the entire game to create a lasting lead, a dunk from center Paschal Chukwu pushed it to double-digits. Two free-throws from Howard and a layup from Battle ensured the lead stayed that way and, by 2:37, the Orange had finished a 14-2 run over seven minutes.

Boeheim stayed mostly seated after that, knowing his team finally secured the victory. He stood up with five seconds left and watched as Stewart hit another layup, but by this time it didn’t matter.

As the clock wound down, he put his gray suit jacket back on and tamped the collar down. He went down the line shaking hands, then crossed in front of his own bench again and sighed before heading toward the locker room.

On a night when things should’ve been easy, nothing was. But it was still a win.

Published on January 16, 2018 at 11:06 pm

Contact Sam: sjfortie@syr.edu | @Sam4TR