Jim Boeheim
Jim Boeheim
James Arthur "Jim" Boeheimis the head coach of the men's basketball team at Syracuse University. Boeheim has guided the Orange to nine Big East regular season championships, five Big East Tournament championships, and 28 NCAA Tournament appearances, including three appearances in the national title game. In those games, the Orange lost to Indiana in 1987, on a last-second jump shot by Keith Smart, and to Kentucky in 1996, before defeating Kansas in 2003 with All-American Carmelo Anthony...
ProfessionCoach
Date of Birth17 November 1944
CityLyons, NY
We're not a high turnover team. We take care of the ball well in games. I think we're a little bit unsure offensively and everyone's trying too hard to make something happen. But we have to get better movement. In the second half, we got a little better movement and a little better spacing and we got some real good possessions.
We have struggled a little bit but we have lost five games to teams that were ranked in the Top Ten. This is a tough league. We still have tough games ahead. Every game in this league is a must win.
We relied on Hakim (Warrick) and Gerry a little bit too much last year.
Gerry was able to get in the lane and the big guys reacted better, I think, than they have. They got open a little bit better.
It was a great, great tournament. I'm really glad for Gerry. He started his career a little bit, probably a little bit too good, and where are you going to go after that? But he's come back and had four great years for us. He's got unbelievable heart; he really does.
They got off to a little bit of a bad start. And we didn't take advantage of that.
I don't think we can go into everything that was said in the locker room. We just wanted to come back and be a little more physical on defense and get to their shooters a little bit better. When you're 15 down and you can get a couple quick baskets, it's a 10-point game and you still have 16 minutes to go. It's not so much to overcome really.
You start thinking about it a little bit more. I'm going out recruiting Sunday so that takes a little bit of the edge off.
This was a heck of a comeback from that kind of deficit against a team that controls the game. You just can't give anybody that kind of lead and expect to come back, but we just keep plugging away and as long as we get Gerry some looks he's going to make his share.
This was a heart-and-soul type of game. I've questioned the toughness of our players a couple times. When you lose four in a row and you do what we had to do to win, that's a tremendous tribute to the toughness of these kids.
We made a couple bad mistakes at the end of the game. And fortunately Gerry corrected them.
Without Gerry McNamara, we wouldn't have won 10 games this year.
When Connecticut caught us, and they caught us a lot, we kept going. Gerry wouldn't let it get away. He was playing on half a leg today. He's got more guts than anybody I've ever coached.
We knew the first stretch in this league will be the hardest stretch in this league. We have another tough game, and we'll see how we are after that.