Orangemen Squeeze Past NCSU
These are just the kind of games No. 12 Syracuse has been winning all season - and North Carolina State losing.
Preston Shumpert scored 25 points and Damone Brown got the game-winning layup with 17.6 seconds left as the Orangemen escaped with a 54-53 victory Saturday over the Wolfpack.
"We've got a lot of character, a lot of heart, and we had a lot of guts because we had no business coming back at the end of that thing," Syracuse coach Jim Boeheim said.
The Orangemen (18-3) shot 29 percent in the first half and trailed by 11 points with 5:26 left, but went on a 16-4 closing run to pull it out on the road.
Syracuse was 17-for-50 from the field before making 6-of-8 down the stretch.
"I've said all along I don't know if we're very good or not but we're going to keep trying," said Boeheim, who moved within seven wins of 600. "We couldn't get anything going for 35 minutes except for Preston. He kept us hanging around."
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"That's not our game," Shumpert said when asked about employing pressure. "The press was out of desperation."
"Then all of the sudden we made a couple of shots, too," Boeheim said.
The Wolfpack (10-10) fell to 0-6 this season against ranked teams and have lost 10 straight games to Top 25 clubs dating to last season.
"People handle adversities and hardships differently," Wolfpack coach Herb Sendek said. "Some people go jump off a bridge, other people keep getting back up and fighting.
Sendek said he felt confident his club would not back down over the final month of the Atlantic Coast onference regular season.
"If you dismiss everything and say we're just snakebitten then you can't correct the things that are under your control," he said.
Shumpert, who also had nine rebounds, made two 3-pointers over the final run, while DeShaun Williams had six points before the dramatic closing seconds.
The decisive play was designed for Shumpert to come off a screen, but he was guarded and fired the ball inside to Jeremy McNeil, who almost lost it out of bounds. But McNeil made a nice save and got the ball to Brown for the winning shot.
"On the last play Preston penetrated and couldn't get anything and I don't know how he got it to Jeremy, and I don't know how Jeremy got it to Damone," Boeheim said. "It certainly wasn't any play I drew up. I wish I had."
N.C. State's final shot by Clifford Crawford was a bad one a driving banker that didn't draw iron with three seconds left as the Wolfpack lost another close one. Coming in, N.C. State's five losses to ranked teams were by an average of six points.
Syracuse won despite registering a season-low point total and matching a season-high with 22 turnovers.
"More than not we felt like we were going to lose this game," Shumpert said. "But as we started getting closer and closer we started feeling more and more that we could win it. When we cut it to one we knew we could win it."
Brown added 12 points and 12 rebounds for the Orangemen.
The Wolfpack got 11 points from Crawford, but shot 35 percent and also turned it over 22 times in a defensive struggle.
"We've lost three tough games this week, three teams that have been in the top 10," Sendek said of North Carolina, Wake Forest and Syracuse. "We've played all three to the wire. I don't know that that's the earmark of a bad team."
The Wolfpack had held the Orangemen to one field goal over a 12-minute span at the end of the first half and the beginning of the second, and led by as many as 12 points in the second half before Syracuse's finally rally.
Shumpert had 15 points in the first 15 minutes, but he was almost all of Syracuse's offense.
The Orangemen led 18-17, then went cold, getting just one basket over the final 9:54 of the half as the Wolfpack took control. Syracuse was 1-for-13 and turned it over seven times during its awful offensive stretch.
The Wolfpack could have been up by more than 11 points at the break, but missed six of 13 free throws and coughed the ball up five times during its 15-3 run.
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