Syracuse men’s basketball: Jim Boeheim, players react to 80-68 loss to Colgate

NCAA Basketball: Colgate at Syracuse — Rich Barnes-USA TODAY Sports

The rebuilding Orange got their first reality check of the season facing the Raiders

The Syracuse Orange drop to 1-1 on the new season after an 80-68 loss to in-state rival Colgate. Here’s what Head Coach Jim Boeheim and his players had to say afterwards:

Jim Boeheim

“Colgate is a really good team, and they’re a lot better than we are right now.”
“We did a lot of good things on defense. Our offense was horrendous.”
On Tucker Richardson, who finished 7/11 from deep: “He’s the best player in their league, and he’s always played well against us.”
“I wanted to try to play man-to-man, but it was pretty quickly apparent that was not going to work.”
“Colgate probably moves the ball better… and has better shooters than any team we’ll play this year.” Added “they’re going to be in the NCAA Tournament again this year.”
Joe Girard took “six or seven shots he probably shouldn’t have taken;” tried to do too much alone to get SU back in the game.
“We were really standing too much on offense. We didn’t have good movement.”
Said Chris Bell was “standing outside and waiting to shoot” and needs to focus more on rebounding and defense. Boeheim followed through on his threat from the season opener to not play a one-way Bell; he only had 8 minutes on the floor last night.

Benny Williams

On team’s defensive struggles: “I think all of our freshmen are contributing. So I don’t think that’s the issue, it’s just not being locked in every single possession.”
“Communication is a key to our defense, and defense wins championships.”
On the offense: “We need to be better on getting more assists, sharing the ball more. I think we’re doing a lot of one-on-one basketball right now.”

Joe Girard

Offense needs to generate more movement to open up room in the pain for Jesse.
“It’s not good to be losing, but it’s kind of good to have a tough game like this early in the season and let the new guys learn about it.”
“We never gave up. I think that was a good thing. We never stopped playing.”

Judah Mintz

“We knew they could shoot, and we still weren’t able to stop shots.”
“They weren’t making contested threes. They were pretty much this rotate, rotate, rotate into open shots. They weren’t doing anything special, but it was it was good enough to beat our zone.”
“We’re not as good as we thought, obviously. But we got high spirits. We’ll be ready to play Saturday.”