MORGANTOWN, W.Va. – With just more than a minute to play last night in its game against the Syracuse men’s basketball team, West Virginia, despite being down by eight points, stalled on offense.

Most fans in the WVU Coliseum jeered. Some left, perturbed their Mountaineers never attempted a last-minute run at SU’s lead.

They didn’t realize that, with the way SU’s defense has played lately, it probably wouldn’t have mattered.

For the fourth straight game, SU held an opponent to less than 60 points. And for the fourth straight game, that defense carried Syracuse to a win. This time, it was over West Virginia, 65-52, at WVU Coliseum in front of 6,801.

‘We’ve been playing very good defense every night,’ SU head coach Jim Boeheim said. ‘This was no exception.’

With the win, No. 24 Syracuse (20-6, 10-5 Big East) kept itself in position to finish fourth in the Big East and therefore earn a first-round bye in the conference tournament. If SU beats Connecticut on Sunday or Seton Hall loses at Rutgers, the Orangemen will bypass the opening round.

If Syracuse earns the bid, it will be because of its defense, which turned in another stalwart effort last night. West Virginia (14-12, 6-8) shot 37 percent, including 18 percent on 3-pointers. SU harried WVU into 11 turnovers and allowed just one player – center D’Or Fischer, who finished with 19 points – to score more than 12.

That superlative defense is becoming ho-hum for the Orangemen. In its four-game win streak, Syracuse hasn’t allowed its opponent to shoot more than 37 percent and held Georgetown to 27 percent to begin the run.

Ironically, SU’s scoring struggles led to its defensive surge. With its offense stagnating game by game, Syracuse realized that its identity as an offensive machine had to change.

‘You don’t want to go out there and try to outscore everybody every single game,’ SU forward Hakim Warrick said. ‘Buckling down on defense has really helped us win these games.’

‘The players realized they had to get it done,’ Boeheim said. ‘We weren’t getting it done that much on offense, and we wanted to win games. Our demise was predicted a few games ago that we weren’t going to get anywhere. The players took that to heart. They worked hard on defense and turned this whole thing right around.’

Last night, it was man-to-man defense, not SU’s vaunted zone, that perpetuated the turnaround.

In the first half, the Mountaineers settled for shooting over SU’s zone, going 4-for-16 from 3-point range. The only time West Virginia even looked inside was to collapse SU’s zone and then kick it back out behind the arc. WVU was so reluctant to penetrate that it didn’t draw a foul from Syracuse until nine minutes remained in the first half.

To stop the Mountaineers’ fire-away strategy, Boeheim inserted Jeremy McNeil, pressed the Mountaineers briefly and switched to man-to-man.

‘In the first half they were shooting the lights out,’ SU guard Gerry McNamara said. ‘They were hurting us from the outside, and we had to go man to take that away.’

For the most part, SU did, turning a 30-29 halftime advantage into a 47-39 lead with 12 minutes remaining.

But Syracuse couldn’t keep WVU’s shooters at bay the entire game. To slow the game down, Boeheim switched back to the zone with about six minutes left. A Johannes Herber trey capped a 10-4 run that pulled West Virginia to a 57-52 disadvantage with 2:40 left.

But Syracuse countered, like it did most of the game on offense, with Warrick. The star forward slammed home two acrobatic alley-oops from McNamara on back-to-back possessions to seal the game. For good measure, Warrick slammed home a dunk from almost the third block for the final two of his game-high 25 points.

‘When they went man-to-man, we got the ball to Hak,’ Boeheim said. ‘He’s hard to stop down low.’

And lately, it seems, he’s meeting his toughest competition in practice. SU’s defense is beginning to look like the beast it became in the NCAA Tournament a year ago, and it has helped erase SU’s struggles from earlier this season.

‘With everything this team’s done, to get through these games, to win four straight and six out of seven, is a tremendous accomplishment,’ Boeheim said. ‘They’re playing as well now as they have any time during the season. We’re playing our best basketball right now.’

Published on March 2, 2004 at 12:00 pm