CHICAGO — All those losses. Jim Boeheim’s suspension. The doubts and indignation that Syracuse is even in the NCAA tournament.
Rather than break them apart, those challenges — all of them — served to bring the Orange to where they are now. With a gritty comeback victory against Gonzaga on Friday night, 10th-seeded Syracuse advanced to the Midwest Region final and will play Sunday for a spot in the Final Four.
“Certain things have happened,” Trevor Cooney said in what may qualify as the understatement of the year. “But this group has stayed strong, and we’re fortunate to have great coaches to lead us in the right way. Everyone has just come together.”
Other teams would have crumbled under the circumstances Syracuse faced early in the season. Boeheim, the Orange’s Hall of Fame coach, was suspended for nine games for a series of NCAA violations. He missed the last part of the non-conference schedule and three games once the ACC season began.
The ACC is a Darwinian gauntlet under the best of circumstances, and the Orange were clearly ill-equipped to navigate it without Boeheim. Their 0-4 start doesn’t look quite so bad now, with one of the losses coming at Miami, which reached the Sweet 16, and another to top-seeded North Carolina, in Boeheim’s first game back.
Back then, though, the season might as well have been over. They managed to regroup, only to end the year on another skid with five losses in the last six games. It was an ugly finish, made even uglier by Boeheim’s very public criticism of Tyler Roberson after the loss to Pittsburgh.
“If I had anyone else, he wouldn’t play a minute,” Boeheim said then.
Now, Boeheim will never be mistaken as warm and fuzzy. But that criticism was particularly vicious, and it seemed to anyone watching as if Boeheim and his players just wanted the season to be done and make a fresh start of it next year.
Seemed to everyone on the outside, perhaps. But the mind-set in the Syracuse locker room was very different.
All anyone else saw were the losses, but Syracuse knew the reasons for them and, more important, the lessons they taught. One was at North Carolina, an almost impossible place to win this season. Another was at Florida State when the Seminoles were fighting for their postseason lives.
And still another came in the ACC Tournament, a complete crapshoot for even the best of teams.
“People didn’t expect us to be here. But in our minds, we knew we could do this,” Malachi Richardson said.
While the rest of the country howled and screamed about Syracuse being in the field of 68 with a 19-13 record, the Orange knew better. Being tested so often had hardened them. Regardless of what they encountered in the tournament, they had already overcome worse.
When Gonzaga went up by nine with less than seven minutes to play and Syracuse could find little, if anything that worked offensively, the Orange buckled down on defense. They pressed the Bulldogs relentlessly, sucking every last bit of life out of them with one stop after another.
Kyle Wiltjer, who couldn’t miss for much of the night, suddenly couldn’t buy a bucket. Domantas Sabonis had to have felt as if he was wrestling an octopus for all the hands and arms that were in his face whenever he got near the basket.
With his teammates supplying the cover, Michael Gbinije created enough offense to give Syracuse a slim, one-point lead with 22 seconds left.
Then Tyler Lydon finished it off, making a monster block with 11 seconds left and draining a pair of free throws with two seconds left to seal the 63-60 victory.
“We’ve been confident the whole year,” Lydon said when asked if Syracuse’s confidence ever waned.
“We’ve been in that situation before — many times, particularly early in the year,” he said. “We learned a lot from those, and it helped us in this case.”
Syracuse could have cashed it in any number of times this season. But that would have been the easy way out, and they’re determined to tough it out to the end.
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