S.U. 76 St. John's 70

The Orange win their Big East opener in a "heavy weight boxing match" as the announcers repeated over and over and over and over again throughout the game. We got it, it's two old school team's playing new school ball with freshmen.

Alright back to the game. Arinze Onuaku had another career day dominating the inside, finished with a career high 23 points and a solid 13 boards. He and the rest of team missed a bunch of free throws that's going to cost them an important Big East game. 17-31 from the line is inexcusable again. Pretty much everyone on the court was a part of that poor performance. Flynn was the only member of the Orange who shot above 67%, but even he missed two clutch free throws that would have iced the game a little earlier.

The Orange should have won this game by much more. They really buckled down on defense but allowed St. John's many extra looks with poor defensive rebounding. Syracuse had a significant size and strength advantage, but didn't use it, as Paul Harris, Donte Green, and Onuaku were constantly out of position.

S.U. also took a lot of quick, bad shots. Scoop and Johnny were the biggest offenders of that. Donte took a lot of bad shots also, but many of his went in. They only took 13 threes, a few too many for my liking (See below in the preview for that), but I said they would only take more than 10 if Donte got hot early and he did. Once he cooled down, the 'Cuse stopped going behind the arc looking for points.

Flynn distributed the ball well, getting seven quick assists, but many of those were going to Donte Green during his hot streak in the first half. Green scored 18 points in a hurry knocking down basically everything that came his way. He's kind of like Demetris Nichols in the fact that he shows up and then fades away. D-Nic struggled in that manor until his senior year, let's hope Donte gets over that quickly. Part of Green's struggles were due to the fact he picked up his fourth foul fairly early in the second half.

S.U. kept the turnovers down, losing the ball just 10 times for the second straight game. They also forced 15 Red Storm turnovers. The 2-3 zone was active again; St. John's was terrible from three, but that was expected. The Red Storm his just 5 of 23 from deep, with most of those coming late.

Overall, I'd give the performance about a B+ because it was the Big East opener. If they played this way in the second half on the conference slate it would be more of a B or B-, but they are young, and these kind of games happen. They still managed to win it despite really never being able to St. John's away until about three minutes left.