Orange Crush

NEW YORK CITY – Game after game in the 2006 Big East Tournament, Pitt had the answer. Whether… NEW YORK CITY – Game after game in the 2006 Big East Tournament, Pitt had the answer. Whether it was the right substitution, a timely substitution or the perfectly designed play, Jamie Dixon’s bunch made enough plays to parlay its sixth seed into a trip to the conference finals.

The problem for them, though, was that there was simply no answer for pure magic.

A week after suffering a humiliating 39-point loss to DePaul – a team that didn’t even qualify for the 12-team Big East Tournament – Syracuse entered last week’s Big East Tournament with its hopes for an NCAA Tournament berth on life support. The ninth-seeded Orange rebounded with possibly the most startling run in conference history, upsetting three ranked teams – the last a 65-61 win over the Panthers in Saturday’s championship game – to take the title.

“This was one of those nights where we weren’t going to be denied,” Syracuse coach Jim Boeheim said. “This team showed more heart and guts than any team I’ve ever coached. We had just enough to hang on.”

Behind Gerry McNamara, Syracuse’s senior leader and eventual David Gavitt Trophy winner (awarded to the Tournament’s most valuable player), the Orange became the first team to win the Big East Tournament without a first-round bye, winning four games by a combined eight points, all in thrilling fashion. In all three of the Orange’s games leading up to the final, Syracuse trailed in the game’s weaning moments and needed clutch plays from McNamara to eke out victories.

In the first round, against Cincinnati, he hit a miraculous running 3 from the top of the key that swished through the net as the buzzer sounded, giving Syracuse a 74-73 win and a quarterfinal date with No. 1 Connecticut the next day. Against the Huskies, his team trailed 74-71 but forced overtime when McNamara drove the length of the court and hit a pull-up NBA-range 3 pointer with five seconds left. Syracuse outlasted the top seed 86-84 in the extra session.

McNamara did it again the next day in the semifinals against No. 23 Georgetown, this time dishing out the game-winner. After hitting a 3 to bring his team within 57-56, he took a steal down on a fast break and laid it off to freshman Eric Devendorf, whose layup with only seconds left gave the Orange a one-point win, setting an unlikely matchup with the No. 16-ranked Panthers.

This is the kind of surreal story Pitt was up against on Saturday, and the Panthers didn’t help their cause with sloppy play early on.

Syracuse built an early double-digit lead on the Panthers (24-7 overall) in the championship game. Demetris Nichols hit a 3 from the corner to open up a 21-7 lead eight minutes in, sending the pro-Syracuse Madison Square Garden crowd into a frenzy.

The lead swelled to 15 points minutes later when McNamara drove in and hit a layup for two of his 14 points. Pitt tried everything to counter, cycling in player after player and shuffling its lineup like a deck of cards, the kind of adjustments that helped the Panthers hold off Louisville on Wednesday, rally past No. 21 West Virginia on Thursday and dismantle No. 2 Villanova in the Friday night semifinals.

On this night, though, the answers simply weren’t there. The Panthers missed uncontested inside shots – Pitt shot only 28 percent in the first half, falling behind 34-25 after the first 20 minutes -and lost the rebounding battle, 35-34.

“We felt we had to win the battle of the boards and we didn’t, we lost it by one,” Dixon said afterward.

As hot as the Orange had been all tournament, Syracuse did hit a wall in the second half, leaving the door open for Pitt to make a comeback. Stout defense helped Pitt claw all the way back to take the lead for one time in the second half. A layup by freshman Sam Young – making his second consecutive start – gave Pitt a 48-47 lead with 8:34 left, meaning the Panthers were up for the first time since a Carl Krauser 3 opened the scoring in the first half.

Syracuse, however, had the answer and it was one that didn’t require any planning at all.

After a brief timeout, McNamara took the inbound, dribbled to his left and nailed a 3 over Pitt freshman Levance Fields, giving the Orange the lead for good. Nicholas hit a big 3 in the corner to extend the lead to five at 53-48. Just when Pitt looked like it had lost its opportunity, Antonio Graves hit a 3 from the corner to bring the margin back to two. The teams traded 3s and 2s, leaving the score at 59-56 with 26.9 seconds left and Pitt in possession.

Krauser – who led Pitt with 16 points on the night – came down the court, pump faked and got Devendorf in the air. Krauser went up for the shot and drew contact behind the 3-point arc, looking for a foul call that would award him three free throws to tie the game.

That call never came.

Syracuse scooped up the ball when it came loose from the contact, pushed it up court and got a slam dunk to seal the game, dropping the Panthers to 1-4 in Big East title games.

“It was a good game that came down to a couple of plays at the end,” Pitt coach Jamie Dixon said. “We came up a little short. It wasn’t for a lack of intensity.”