By Conor Orr

Sports Editor

SOUTH BEND, Ind. – An hour before gametime Monday, forwards Arinze Onuaku and Rick Jackson took turns ripping thunderous dunks on one another. While their teammates warmed up behind them, Syracuse’s two forwards took feeds from conditioning coach Lazarus Sims and muscled one another toward the basket.

This was not a normal part of the routine, though, as the team equipment managers looked on, perplexed: Why were warm-ups all of a sudden modified?

But with one roar from the Notre Dame student section, the reason for the forwards’ extra pre-game sweat became abundantly clear. Big East preseason Player of the Year Luke Harangody had arrived, and for the last three years, he had owned the Orange frontcourt.

‘Harangody is as good of an offensive player as I’ve ever seen in my limited experience in this league,’ SU head coach Jim Boeheim joked. ‘He can shoot the 3 now, he can drive it, he’s good around the basket. He’s a tremendous offensive player.’

Though SU came away with a double-digit victory, Harangody finished with 31 points and 14 rebounds, his best performance ever against Syracuse. Through a tireless effort, Harangody almost single-handedly assumed the responsibilities of the Irish frontcourt, while causing matchup problems for Onuaku and Jackson underneath the basket.

‘They attacked us inside extremely well,’ Boeheim said. ‘Luke’s going to score – we just tried to limit him a little bit.’

When it came to the Orange matching up against Harangody, the story was nearly the same year in and year out. He scored 21 points in a victory in 2007, tallied 14 points and 14 rebounds in a 2008 lashing out in South Bend, and totaled 26 points in the Orange’s 2009 victory over the Irish, its only previous win in Harangody’s three years.

This year, Boeheim toyed with the idea of isolating Harangody completely and allowing him to take his shots while locking down the other four players on the court.

‘He’s going to get his points,’ Boeheim said. ‘We thought about playing man-to-man like we did last year and just let him shoot, take 28 or 29 shots, and just let him miss a few, and he did, and guard the other guys. But we’re not quite good enough man-to-man to do that.’

Onuaku improves free-throw percentage

In a back and forth game that emphasized many different facets of the Orange offense, it could be easy to overlook the night Arinze Onuaku had from the free-throw line.

The senior center, whose career free-throw percentage is an abysmal 39.6 percent, improved drastically Monday, going 5-for-9 from the charity stripe in crucial situations.

Onuaku credits the success to extra time spent during practice with associate head coach Bernie Fine. To honor Fine during the game, Onuaku pounded his chest after making some critical free throws and pointed toward the bench.

‘Yeah, he’s my guy every day in practice when we are working on it,’ Onuaku said. ‘So I mean, he’s talking to me and he’s telling me to relax, so that’s what I do.’

When the game got tighter in the second half, the need for Onuaku to come up big on the line increased. The game plan required him to get after Harangody, draw fouls and get to the stripe. The more foul trouble he could put the Irish frontcourt in, the better off the Orange would be down the stretch.

Each time he stepped to the line, Onuaku said that he thought of Fine’s advice. He calmed down and hit the shots — no laughing matter when staring into an all-green Notre Dame student section, which employed various distraction tactics by waving their arms as well as toting giant cardboard cutouts of the heads of Ricky Martin, Arnold Schwarzenegger and Regis Philbin.

‘I stepped to the line with confidence,’ Onuaku said. ‘I mean, when a game is close like that, I know they are going to try and foul me down the stretch, so I just tried to relax and knock them down.’

ctorr@syr.edu

Published on January 18, 2010 at 12:00 pm