After Cornell hit two back-to-back 3-pointers to take a one-point lead, Syracuse head coach Quentin Hillsman told his players to make two simple adjustments: get out on the shooters on defense and push the ball to the rim on offense.

And with those two changes came the Syracuse onslaught.

Beginning with 5:21 left in the first half, Syracuse reeled off a 34-2 run, and the Orange (2-0) pulled away to a dominant 86-45 victory over the Big Red (0-2) in front of 1,020 fans in the Carrier Dome Monday. SU’s suffocating defense, coupled with a big rebounding edge, powered the Orange to a 21-0 run that started immediately after Cornell took the lead on a Shelby Lyman 3-pointer.

From that point on, SU outscored the Big Red 60-18 the rest of the way.

‘Down the stretch, I thought we really did a very good job of closing the game out,’ Hillsman said. ‘That’s all we really wanted to do was to come out in the second half and close the game out. Get some distance in between us just so we could get down the floor, play in transition and get some easy baskets.’

The Orange started the game with a heavy dose of Kayla Alexander. On Syracuse’s first two possessions, it fed the ball to Alexander in the post and never let up from there. Her long 6-foot-4 frame towered over the Cornell defenders, helping her tally 19 points and pull down eight boards in the game.

But even with Alexander dominating in the post, SU couldn’t pull away from the Big Red for the first 15 minutes of the game. Cornell had an answer for each small Syracuse spurt, typically in the form of one of its five first-half 3-pointers.

‘Honestly, they were getting the same 3s in the same spot every possession,’ Hillsman said. ‘So we had to just get our guards to play a little further up the floor.’

And once the Orange did that, the rout was on. Eleven seconds after Lyman gave the Big Red its only lead of the game, SU point guard Tasha Harris drained a 3-pointer to put SU back up by two. The next Cornell shot was a miss by Kristina Danielak, starting a 0-for-11 stretch that lasted just more than nine minutes.

While the Orange was forcing turnovers and contesting shots on defense, its offense exploded on the other end of the floor, mostly by getting to the rim and crashing the boards.

‘I think in practice we go against each other so well that when we do come in the game, we are really aggressive on the boards,’ said junior forward Iasia Hemingway, who pulled in eight rebounds to go along with her 10 points. ‘So that’s why we’re so good at that.’

If it wasn’t Alexander posting up the Big Red, it was a slashing drive by one of the Orange guards that led to second-chance points. Twenty-three offensive rebounds led to 28 second-chance points for the Orange. SU dominated Cornell 52-28 on the glass, including 34-8 in the second half.

‘We did start going to the glass more,’ sophomore guard Carmen Tyson-Thomas said. ‘Because at halftime, our coach told us that we were getting out-rebounded, so that just gave us a little bit more motivation to get to the boards, and we started making shots.’

The rebounding also created more chances for the Orange’s perimeter players. Freshman guard La’Shay Taft came off the bench and hit four 3-pointers, three of them after Hillsman had made his two simple adjustments.

Syracuse’s offense shined while the Orange got the ball into the paint and crashed the boards. And defensively, SU simply had to get a hand up on the Big Red’s shooters.

‘It’s one of those things where you have the same player getting the same look every time,’ Hillsman said. ‘It’s a simple adjustment. And the adjustment was just — go get her. It wasn’t a scheme thing. It was like she’s in front of you — go get her.’

zjbrown@syr.edu

Published on November 15, 2010 at 12:00 pm