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Eagles burn SU on glass

CHESTNUT HILL, Mass. – Hakim Warrick sat on a bench in the Syracuse men’s basketball team’s locker room after Saturday’s 65-60 loss to Boston College and looked down at the floor.A towel covered his face and his emotions. He spoke quietly and succinctly. After all there wasn’t much to say after Syracuse lost for the fourth time in the past six games besides the one word Warrick and his teammates kept repeating: rebounding.’Definitely the rebounding,’ Warrick said with his voice barely reaching audible status. ‘The rebounding won that game for them.’No. 6 Boston College (22-1, 11-1 Big East) grabbed 45 rebounds on Saturday – 14 more than Syracuse and 12 more than SU’s opponent average. The only game Syracuse allowed more rebounds was against Oklahoma State, when the Cowboys nabbed 46. The problem with BC’s rebounding edge on Saturday fell on the offensive end where BC grabbed 18 offensive boards. That meant 18 different times Syracuse’s defense successfully stopped a BC possession and 18 times the Eagles had a second or third chance to score. The Eagles converted for 19 second-chance points compared to Syracuse’s 10. That nine-point difference alone eclipsed BC’s margin of victory. Boston College twice extended its lead to six points in the final six minutes of the game on second-chance opportunities, further emphasizing the point. BC’s Jermaine Watson missed a 3 with 5:39 remaining on one of them, but senior Craig Smith got a rebound and kicked it back to Watson, who nailed the 3 on the second try.If you give a team two shots every possession, there’s a good chance the team will hit one of them. ‘We’re playing well enough in every area of the game to win these games,’ said Syracuse head coach Jim Boeheim. ‘We’re not rebounding.’Coming into the Silvio O. Conte Forum on Saturday, Syracuse knew it had to rebound to win. So what did the Orange do on the very first possession of the game? Allow Boston College to grab two offensive rebounds, before finally, on its third try, the Eagles scored. Syracuse junior guard Gerry McNamara said SU’s problems with rebounding are not a secret, and he’s right.’That seems to be the recurring theme for our losses,’ he said. ‘We’re going to have to look at some tape, try to figure it out and bounce back.’In SU’s four Big East losses, its opponents have outrebounded the Orange by an average of 11 boards.The one time in its last six games that Syracuse actually held a rebounding edge, it easily won, beating Villanova, 90-75. Even in Syracuse’s come-from-behind win over Notre Dame, the Orange won despite being outrebounded.Syracuse left Boston on Saturday knowing its rebounding needs to improve before the Orange can make a serious dent in the NCAA Tournament or even the Big East tournament in early March. Syracuse will only go as far as its rebounding takes it.’For us to be as good as we want to be, we’re going to have to correct our rebounding down the stretch,’ Boeheim said. ‘That’s the bottom line for what our team can be or could be.’After the game, each SU player echoed that there are no additional techniques to learn to rebound better. There’s no magic potion to sip, no secret formula. They all know the problem exists and that it needs to be corrected.Now they just have to fix it.’We’re big enough. We’re certainly strong enough to rebound the basketball,’ Boeheim said. ‘It’s very disappointing to lose games like this. You’re going to look back and think we didn’t guard somebody or we turned it over. We missed an easy shot. ‘But there’s really nothing to look back in this game other than the fact we didn’t rebound the basketball.’

Scott Bisang is a staff writer for The Daily Orange where his columns appear regularly. E-mail him at smbisang@syr.edu.





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