Life is Rough when You Dance with Blue Devils; Syracuse Women’s Basketball Drop 62-50 to No. 13 Duke
Jesse Cook
Three-point misses, field goal woes, and turning the ball back over to foes caused a close game to slip out of Syracuse’s hands. The S.U. women’s basketball team dropped to No. 13 Duke 62-50 Sunday afternoon in Cameron Indoor Stadium.
The Orange began the game on a 7-0 run, and that lead held until the four-minute mark of the second quarter. That’s when Duke guard Celeste Taylor nailed a triple, giving her squad its first lead of the affair, one that the Blue Devils would never let slip.
First of all, the rebounding game landed heavily in favor of Duke, recording 38 to Syracuse’s 27.
Also, the Dukies lit up the board from long range. Shooting 30% from beyond the arc is an impressive feat, but accomplishing that entirely in the first half shows how little the home squad had to work in the second half.
That said, the Cuse brought the score to within five late in the fourth quarter, so the game did not wind up out of reach until very late.
A massive problem for S.U. resulted in poor shooting, and that makes just another brick the wall that has surrounded the basket, lately.
In three-straight games, the Orange have been outshot by their opponents, and they wound up on the bottom of every single one of those three affairs.
Duke marked the third of those tragedies for the Cuse. S.U. shot 35.3%, but the home team nailed 44.4% of their shots from the floor.
Positives with which Syracuse can exit the game include the fact that guard Alaina Rice led the team in scoring with 15, and that they never looked infinitely worse than Duke.
First, Rice shows signs of long-range proficiency with a perfect two-for-two mark from three-point-land and a six-of-10 shooting line, as a whole.
And for the second point, the largest Duke lead of 13 evaporated to a two-point game in the second half. There was no point until the final couple of minutes that Syracuse showed any signs of forfeit.
That mentality of playing until the final whistle could come in handy on Thursday night at 7 p.m. as Virginia comes to town and the Cuse returns to the Dome.
