SALT LAKE CITY Ronald Nored couldn’t get enough as he burst through the final hundred feet between the court and the concrete tunnel that would take him to the fuse-lit Butler locker room, primed to explode.

‘Yes sir! Yes sir!’

The guard repeated it ad nauseam as he catapulted his right arm toward every Bulldog fan left hanging over the stands with an empty outstretched hand sitting near the entrance.

‘Yes sir! Yes sir!’ 

The moment, following the No. 5 seed Bulldogs’ 63-59 upset victory over Syracuse Thursday, was a blur. The kind of light-speed consciousness that would lend itself to forgetting what had just happened. But even as he was herded toward the press table following a few twists and turns, the details were still clear. There was no question about why he was sitting in this position.

‘It was our defense that was going to carry us,’ Nored said. ‘I think it did that.’

Leading the Bulldogs with five steals, he was the spokesman for the insatiable Butler defense that rendered Syracuse’s breakneck offense powerless. From the opening tipoff, Syracuse was backpedaling, cycling through its second and third options in a desperate search for a window of opportunity.

‘They forced us into 18 turnovers playing man-to-man defense,’ Syracuse assistant coach Rob Murphy said. ‘Very seldom does that happen.’

In the Orange locker room, the broken look canvassing each of the soggy-eyed Syracuse players told the tail end of that story —  what can happen to a team that simply cannot score, a team that gave up 23 points off turnovers and a team that registered its lowest first-half point total of the year. 

But during the game, the looks of panic and uncertainty were omnipresent, foreshadowing what would eventually be the bite of reality that brought Syracuse’s dream season crashing down to earth.

Take, for example, the cringe on Scoop Jardine’s face midway through the first half as he tried to muscle off a Bulldog defender just inside half court. Jardine’s driving lane was blocked to one side, and with a quick move to his left he barely got off a pass that was picked by Butler forward Gordon Hayward and returned for a quick two.

Or the way Rick Jackson watched in disbelief as Butler’s Matt Howard pivoted his body around Jackson’s backside to deliver a crushing block, forcing Syracuse back to the drawing board as its head coach, Jim Boeheim, signaled for a damage-control timeout.

It was a look of mounting aggravation. A deep gaze that suggested the odds were stacked against him.

‘I don’t know what it was,’ Jackson said. ‘They just played good. There’s no technical thing, guys were just out there playing. They were never shy or timid to go out and make that home-run play.’

On the other side of the ball, the Bulldogs maintained poise. There were times the Orange offense would go on its runs but were derailed seconds later once Butler could regroup.

Syracuse never had a minute inside its comfort zone. Each time down the floor, the first-option pass was cut off. Orange guards would sit at the top of the key conducting an offense that couldn’t move the way it wanted. At each and every turn, there was a Butler defender draping, emerging to cause a turnover. Turnovers that mounted and consequently snowballed: one after another.  

‘It was like, turn the ball over once, come back down and turn the ball over again,’ junior forward Wes Johnson said. ‘It’s very hard to try and get out of. All those turnovers, they hurt you.’ 

With the way the game ended, Syracuse had the opportunity to second-guess itself in the middle of everything. Maybe, if it would have held onto the ball a little longer, things would have gone differently. If it could have stayed in rhythm for a little longer, it would have been just enough to put this whole mess behind them and into the Elite Eight.

But for Nored, the look on his face as he swung out of the tunnel suggested certainty. There were no ‘ifs and buts’ — this is what makes Butler good. This was the game plan the entire time.

‘We guarded,’ Nored said. ‘That’s what we do.’

ctorr@syr.edu

Published on March 25, 2010 at 12:00 pm