As the Syracuse women’s basketball team jogged through the tunnel following its runaway win over Albany, an Orange fan reached over the railings for high fives.

When the SU players reached up to slap his hand on their way to the locker room, he yelled to each one, ‘Very nice second half.’

But the Orange’s first 20 minutes didn’t warrant the same approval.

Though Syracuse turned things around in the second half to pull away for a 69-38 win over the Great Danes Monday in the Carrier Dome, an ugly beginning kept the game close until halftime. The Orange’s go-to formula of scoring down low and capitalizing on second chances failed. Luckily for SU, turnovers and poor shooting seemed contagious in the Dome, as both teams failed to find any offensive rhythm in the first half.

But senior point guard Tasha Harris still ranked it as one of the worst halves she has seen in her four years with the Orange.

‘That was a really bad half,’ she said. ‘Probably top three.’

Heading into the contest, SU was averaging 35.8 points in the paint per game. Second-chance opportunities accounted for 21 points per game. But in the first 20 minutes Monday, those buckets were all but eliminated.

The Orange tallied just six points from inside and two points on offensive rebounds. Syracuse’s leading scorer, Kayla Alexander, was held to just two points on two free throws. SU held only a 17-16 edge on the glass.

Without Albany’s similar dismal offensive performance in the first half (6-of-27 from the field), the Orange’s 23-17 lead at the break could have been a deficit.

‘Obviously, you can turn the ball over a little bit, and you can do some things that aren’t that good when the team only makes six shots in the first half,’ SU head coach Quentin Hillsman said. ‘And that was the key. … We kind of played enough defense to not let the game get out of hand.’

Had the Orange showed up on the offensive end in the first half, the game could have gotten out of hand in its favor. A number of violations on the offensive end disturbed Syracuse’s offensive rhythm. Five of SU’s 15 turnovers in the first half came on three-second violations, and another two were traveling calls.

Hillsman said he believes the three-second violations were good calls. And they certainly affected SU’s go-to scoring option in the sophomore Alexander, who was called for the violation four times in the first.

‘I think that threw us off a bit,’ Alexander said. ‘Yeah, that definitely had an effect. We tried to just keep playing through it.’

Alexander said she tried to focus on not drawing those calls. And with its center not able to post up in the paint, the Orange struggled. SU shot 7-of-18 from the field in the first half and only grabbed a positive rebounding margin when Shakeya Leary cleaned up Erica Morrow’s final shot of the half.

During the break, players said Harris and Morrow told the Orange things needed to turn around before the coaches came in. Hillsman then intensely echoed those sentiments before the Orange ran away with the 31-point win.

But the first-half struggles were enough of a concern that Harris, Morrow and Hillsman all felt they had to address the team in order to turn things around.

‘We were trying to force the ball inside to (Alexander), and they were basically swarming the post,’ Harris said. ‘We had to just take more rhythm jump shots and swing the ball, get more movement.

‘And we weren’t doing that in the first half.’

zjbrown@syr.edu

Published on December 6, 2010 at 12:00 pm