Alexis Peterson has led Syracuse all season, whether it’s in points, assists or just intangibles. But in 33 seconds, head coach Quentin Hillsman had seen enough to know she wasn’t going to be able to play.

Hillsman yanked his starting point guard off the floor and she put on a white warm-up jacket.

“Did she practice today?” one spectator familiar with members of the team sitting in the front row asked one sitting behind her. The spectator sitting in the second row shook her head no.

“She said she was going to try and she tried it and she couldn’t go,” Hillsman said. “… Once I saw her kind of get on the floor, I knew she didn’t have it. I wasn’t going to put her through that situation.”

Only three players — Briana Day, Maggie Morrison and Cornelia Fondren — scored in double digits in Peterson’s absence. Only Fondren had more than three assists. In the past, Hillsman has said SU can win any game when it hits 10 3s. Only 6-of-32 fell from deep range for Syracuse on Thursday night.

And yet without its star player due to sickness, the Orange (13-4, 3-1 Atlantic Coast) scraped as much as it could from its bench to eventually blow out Pittsburgh (8-9, 0-4) on Thursday night in the Carrier Dome. SU won what was once a close game, 71-48, with nine points of the differential coming in the last frame.

“We’re just trying to get through this stretch of the season,” Hillsman said. “We’ve got some kids banged up, a little under the weather. What a gutsy win on our home floor when we really needed it.”

Hillsman tabbed Fondren, who jumped out of her seat when he decided Peterson couldn’t go. During a timeout after he pulled Peterson, she held her right arm, appeared to get the chills and then ran back down the tunnel to the locker room.

When Peterson came back out, she was dressed in a puffy blue jacket with blue sweatpants and a backpack slung over one of her shoulders. One of the spectators asked her if she needed anything.

“I’m going to go,” Peterson replied, walking toward the Stadium Control exit.

Fondren scrapped her way to the bucket using a Eurostep in Peterson’s absence. It first beat a defender midway through the second quarter and drew a foul later in the same period. She added eight rebounds and five assists to her 11 points.

Toward the beginning of the second quarter, Taylor Ford grabbed an offensive rebound, went right back up with it and got an and-one. Assistant coach Tammi Reiss stood up and shouted at her team that it needs to rebound like that. Ford scored just five points, but grabbed seven boards and tallied three steals.

Isabella Slim missed a breakaway layup with 8:14 left in the fourth quarter, but Maggie Morrison grabbed the miss and put it away for an and-one of her own. Morrison added five boards of her own and Syracuse scored 19 second chance points.

“We still need our point guard whether she’s sick or not,” Fondren said. “Whatever happens to her. We still need her, in a way.”

And SU proved that, while shooting poorly from the field — without Syracuse’s 16 buckets in the paint, the Orange shot just 8-of-56 — its depth is able to persevere.

In the postgame press conference, Briana Day tried to explain why SU was able to make up for its poor shooting performance, why it was able to win a game where the odds were against the Orange.

Her eyes jumped from statistic to statistic on the sheet in front of her, reading them off stream of consciousness. First to rebounds, then second-chance points, then Pitt’s turnovers, then SU’s lack of them, then free throws.

“We tied for rebounds, but that’s OK,” she said.

Steals, back to turnovers.

Finally she got to the end. Bench points. SU got 40 of them.

“We had to get everyone involved,” Day said. “I think that’s what changed the game.”

Published on January 14, 2016 at 11:10 pm

Contact Chris: cjlibona@syr.edu | @ChrisLibonati