Playbook: Wake Forest Demon Deacons vs Syracuse Orange

You don’t have to be a real basketball genius to know that if you turn the ball over 23 times and only make 17 shots in a game, you probably aren’t going to win. That’s exactly what happened to the Deacs on Saturday, as they lost their 17th game of the season to Syracuse by a score of 54-79. This game was pretty gross, so I’m just going to jump right in.

The turnovers in this game for the Deacs were pretty maddening. After all, it’s not like the Orange play an intense pressure defense—they mostly sit back in the zone and only trap a little if you throw the ball into the corner (more on this later). Way too many of our turnovers were completely unforced errors or just plain careless. Several times, the ball hit one of our players in the hands and they just failed to catch it.

Other times, we had simple miscommunications where we threw the ball to guys who weren’t expecting a pass.

And other times, we just lobbed the ball into the middle of the zone and hoped our guy would come down with it.

I don’t know what the issue was, but we were just very out of sorts on the offensive end, and struggled to make simple, fundamental plays.

And then we get to the traps. Several times in the game the Deacs went into the corner against the zone and Syracuse brought a double team. Things did not go well for Wake when this occurred.

The worst part about all of these plays is that apparently we were aware that Syracuse was going to trap in the corner, and allowing it to happen was part of our game plan. Per Conor O’Neill:

Just my 2 cents, but allowing yourself to be trapped in the corner in the hopes that you can pass out of it to an open guy is a pretty terrible strategy. I think the results of said strategy speak for themselves.

On the defensive side of the ball...

...never mind, just forget I mentioned it.

I guess we’re on to the next one. What’s that? We’re playing who where? Ok, we’re on to the next next one.