Syracuse won its second and final preseason game, 84-59, against Division II Southern Connecticut State Monday night in the Carrier Dome. The Orange never led in the first half, going down 11-0 early and trailing by as much as 15 late in the first half. A 12-2 run made it a 5-point game at the half but SU greatly improved its shooting in the second half to win the game.

Here are superlatives from the game.

The Big Moment: Back-to-back 3-pointers to start the second half

Syracuse struggled to get anything going in the first half. The Orange shot 8-of-31 in the frame and had only one assist. A 12-2 run to end the half made it a more palatable 5-point deficit.

The Orange came out much better in the second half, though. On the first play, Frank Howard drove middle and kicked out to Oshae Brissett on the right wing, who knocked down a shot from behind the arc. Tyus Battle missed a shot on the next possession but after an offensive rebound, Frank Howard got the ball in the left corner and knocked down a 3-pointer himself. It tied the game up and marked the change that SU needed from the lackluster first half.

Stud: Oshae Brissett

The freshman forward from Mississauga, Ontario struggled early, much like everyone else on the team. He missed two 3-pointers badly and got called for early fouls.

But Brissett rebounded nicely in the second half to put together a solid all-around game. He was scoring a number of different ways. He knocked down a 3-pointer to start the second half. On one play, he drove left from the right wig, hop stepped into the paint and showed the ball high on a pump fake. As his defenders bit on the fake, Brissett went up and under for a layup. Later in the half, he got the ball in the low right block. He faked middle, and as a second defender came he spun baseline for the layup.

Brissett also showed a good amount of hustle for Syracuse. He picked up two offensive rebounds, scoring the first bucket of the game for SU off of one. He picked up a steal off the press in the second half. As the SCSU player tried to inbound the ball deep toward halfcourt, Brissett leapt with one hand to pick it off.

The forward ended with 16 points, five rebounds, two assists and two steals.

Dud: The entire team in the first half

It’s not fair to pick just one player for this, since the entire team played at an embarrassingly poor level for the first 15 minutes. The Orange got lost on defense and couldn’t knock a shot down.

The team’s leader, Tyus Battle, couldn’t get any of his jump shots to fall. Centers Paschal Chukwu and Bourama Sidibe each struggled to push a much smaller Owls team off the boards.

It ended up not mattering, but for much of the first half, the Orange looked more like its Division II counterpart than the team that’ll try to surprise in the Atlantic Coast Conference this year.

Highlight: Matthew Moyer’s dunk late in the second half.

Much like in last week’s preseason game, the two centers Chukwu and Sidibe racked up the blocks against a much smaller Southern Connecticut State team (the tallest player on the team is 6-foot-7).

But the Orange actually had a few nice offensive highlights in this game. The best one came late in the second half. Graduate transfer Geno Thorpe — playing for the first time after sitting out the last exhibition game with an injury — cut from right to left and attacked the middle of the paint in transition.

As Thorpe sucked in the defense he set up a perfect bounce bass for Matthew Moyer, who was cutting in from the baseline. Moyer caught it in stride and rose up for a slam, letting out a roar on his way down.

Lowlight: The first three minutes of the game

One way to try and beat Syracuse’s 2-3 zone is to try and find the soft spots behind the arc, mainly in the corners. If a team exploits that too much, though, the Orange will usually adjust.

That didn’t happen to start the game. The Owls made three 3-pointers in the first three minutes of the game, each one coming from the right corner. Chukwu came out following the second one after missing a rotation, but that didn’t matter as another one fell a few minutes later. The shots led to an early timeout from Boeheim.

Published on November 6, 2017 at 9:21 pm

Contact Tomer: tdlanger@syr.edu | @tomer_langer