While Syracuse women’s basketball head coach Keith Cieplicki made the necessary adjustments to help SU notch a victory Thursday night against visiting Binghamton, he can’t take too much credit for the shooting clinic that SU put on for the Bearcats.

‘I thought we established the kind of tempo we were looking for,’ he said, ‘in terms of trying to get up and down, and obviously we shot the ball very well. It was probably our best 40 minutes of the year so far.’

‘Tonight (Binghamton) was concentrating on shutting down the posts,’ sophomore guard Lauren Kohn said. ‘Other times our perimeter players are going to be shut down and our post players are going to be left to score.’

Kohn scored a career-high 20 points in Syracuse’s 80-60 win over the Bearcats Thursday night, shooting 6-for-7 from behind the 3-point line. And by Kohn spreading the defense out, senior forward Chineze Nwagbo recorded 16 of her 18 points in the second half. The ‘very well’ that Cieplicki mentioned was closer to astounding as the Orange (5-0) shot a sizzling 73.1 percent from the field in the second half. Syracuse played at its desired pace with a full-court press and the guards pushing the ball up the floor. SU’s post players were faced with constant double teams before the second-half shooting barrage took over.

Defensively, SU’s press caused Binghamton problems.

‘(The press) kind of made the pace of the game a little quicker than we wanted to go,’ Binghamton head coach Rich Conover said. ‘While it wasn’t the turning (point) of the game, I feel at times it did force us to play a little faster and take shots that we normally wouldn’t have taken as early in the offense.’

The Orange only held a six-point edge at halftime, but the tempo began to wear on Binghamton. SU started the half on an 11-2 run, and Kohn was just warming up. After failing to hit a 3-pointer in her first two games, the reigning Big East all-freshman team member is an eye-popping 11-for-16 in her last three games.

‘(My shot) really didn’t feel much different tonight,’ Kohn said. ‘You’re going to have off days and on days, and this was just one day when my shots were falling. We tried to keep the tempo in our hands, and I think we did a really good job of that.’

While Kohn and Nwagbo both scored career highs, their scoring wasn’t the only part of their game on display. Nwagbo had a career-best six assists off relentless Binghamton double teams. Kohn also grabbed a career-high nine rebounds, but it was her seemingly unlimited range that ultimately made for the most lopsided win of the season and the first 80-point game by a Syracuse team since 2002. Cieplicki may have dictated the pace of the game, but he knows he didn’t shoot 6-for-7 on Thursday.

‘She knows she’s good,’ Cieplicki said of Kohn. ‘She’s just a kid that’s going to come to play. She’s doing a great job and she deserves all the credit for it.’

Published on December 2, 2004 at 12:00 pm