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 all know that it's more open now than it's ever been.
Our zone, we just weren't active enough. Our defense was terrible. Any of the games we've lost, our defense has struggled. They got open shots, and that's something we've got to do a better job on.
We gave them four wide open shots at the beginning of the game. You can't do that against a quality team like Villanova.
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.
You can't let him get open. When he got open he made two (three-pointers). I thought we did a good job of finding him and not letting him get set.
You can't let him get loose. He showed what he can do when it gets open by hitting those two threes in the second half. For the most part, we did a good job of not letting him get set.
Defensively, we did a good job, as well as you could expect at this stage of the year. We really helped each other. Our inside guys did a nice job. We really didn't give them too many open looks. We were very good.
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.
We keep playing all these teams, we're going to find that assistant coach who thinks he's overrated. Or that guy is already home.