The Gophers take their first look at a top 25 team today when they play No. 7 ranked Syracuse in the opening game for both teams in the EA Sports Maui Invitational. Former Gophers coach Jim Dutcher told Sports Headliners he expects the Orange defense will target Minnesota’s Andre Hollins in the nationally televised game (ESPN2, 4:30 p.m. Minneapolis time). Hollins, known for his outside scoring, is the Big Ten’s third leading scorer at 18.8 points per game.
Syracuse’s Jim Boeheim is one of the few coaches who uses a zone as his primary defense. “They’re going to favor toward Andre Hollins,” Dutcher said. “No question. Make sure they play up on him and play off on some of the other players. Minnesota’s team is kind of set up as a team that should do a good job of attacking a zone.”
The Gophers’ strength is guard play with long range shooters like Andre and Austin Hollins. Minnesota coach Richard Pitino is committed to outside shooting with an emphasis on three-point shots. Spaces to shoot threes can be plentiful against zone defenses and while the Gophers have made an okay .341 percent of their shots, they have also attempted 126 three-point shots, among the most in the Big Ten Conference this fall.
The Orange annually play “probably” the best zone defense in the country, according to Dutcher. Boeheim, who has been the Syracuse head coach since 1976, is a zone guru and while his knowledge is impressive so, too, are his players. They’re usually talented and most always there’s a lot of size on the roster including players with long arms who make the zone a difficult defense to score against.
Typically, teams playing zone defenses struggle with rebounding because players aren’t positioned to block out opponents as effectively as in man-to-man. This year’s 4-0 Syracuse team, though, is out-rebounding opponents 174-119. The Orange is outscoring a so far weak group of opponents, 74 to 58.5 points per game.
The Gophers lack size and depth among their front court players while Syracuse regulars include 280-pound Rakeem Christmas and 250-pound DaJuan Coleman. The two 6-9 players are averaging 4.3 and 6.8 rebounds per game. The team’s leading rebounder is 6-8 Jerami Grant at 8.0 per game. Baye Moussa Keita, 6-10, averages 5.5 and 6-8 C.J. Fair, the team’s leading scorer at 18 points per game, averages 5.5. And that’s not mentioning three other players on the roster who are 6-7 or taller.
Minnesota and Syracuse have played one previous game prior to this afternoon’s match-up. The Gophers upset the Orange in the 1990 Southeast Region Second Round of the NCAA Tournament and for the first time in school history advanced to the Elite Eight. It was a stunning loss for Syracuse, a team that was No. 1 rated nationally before the season and was led by forward Derrick Coleman who became the overall first pick in the 1990 NBA draft.
Boeheim built his early success at Syracuse with several outstanding players including Leo Rautins, a 6-8 Canadian known as the “white Magic Johnson” because of his guard-like passing and dribbling skills. Rautins played for the Gophers as a freshman during the 1978-79 season. He was part of a national No. 1 rated freshman class recruited by Dutcher, but the Toronto native wasn’t happy at Minnesota.
“You never had to go to class. I wanted to go to school,” Rautins said in the Boeheim biography Color Him Orange.
Rautins wanted to be enrolled in CLA but the University wouldn’t admit him and instead placed him in General College where he was forced to take “remedial classes,” according to Dutcher. “I didn’t think he belonged in General College but that was where he was admitted to, so he was frustrated from day one.”
Dutcher said the other source of frustration was on the court because the Gophers had so many talented guards. “I don’t think he got the amount of floor time that he would have liked to have gotten,” Dutcher explained.
In the biography Boeheim credits Rautins with some big moments for the Orange but by leaving the Gophers he missed out on Minnesota’s 1982 Big Ten championship. Contributors to that Gophers team included Rautins guard rivals Trent Tucker and Darryl Mitchell.
The biography also includes Rick Pitino, the father of the Gophers coach. The older Pitino was the first assistant Boehiem hired when he became Syracuse’s head coach. The book recalled that Pitino was newly married and had just carried his wife over the threshold in a New York hotel when Boeheim contacted him by telephone to set up an interview.
Pitino tried to put off the meeting but Boeheim insisted on coming to the hotel. Pitino relented and told his wife he would return to their hotel room within 30 minutes. “And we went down about 7 o’clock,” Pitino said in Color Him Orange. “I came up a quarter to ten. And every half hour I was calling my wife to tell her I was to going to wrap it up. And every half hour I kept telling him, ‘Jim, all I want to do is get back upstairs.’ …”
Boeheim, who turned 69 on November 17, still hasn’t wrapped up his career and gives no indication of doing so. He is Mr. Syracuse, having played for the Orange as a starting guard in the early 1960s, then becoming a Syracuse assistant and leading the program for almost four decades as head coach. He has won a national championship, coached 27 NCAA tournament teams, never had a losing season and has been inducted into the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame.
Along the way his relationship continued with Rick Pitino who became a close friend, according to the biography. In 1994 Pitino hosted a Kentucky Derby party in Lexington. It was there that a recently divorced Boeheim met one of Pitino’s guests, Juli Greene. “They were like two teenagers in love,” Pitino said in the book.
Boeheim and Greene later married and now have three children. Today in Hawaii Boeheim might think of his connections to the Pitino family, but don’t expect him to give the Gophers any “honeymoon” treatment.
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