Six seconds of silence passed before Jim Boeheim felt the need to address something, unprompted. In the past week, Syracuse has lost out on two five-star recruits in the Class of 2017, Billy Preston and Quade Green.

Preston had Syracuse in his final four and chose Kansas. Green, the point guard whom Gerry McNamara and the Orange recruited for almost two years, had SU in his final two but chose Kentucky after Wildcats head coach John Calipari supposedly promised him the starting point guard job.

SU still has two pledges in the class, four-star forwards Oshae Brissett and Bourama Sidibe. But for some Syracuse fans, that isn’t enough.

“Just cover one thing on recruiting because everybody seems to be … think we’re all done in basketball at Syracuse all of a sudden,” Boeheim said after No. 18 Syracuse’s 101-59 blowout of South Carolina State. “(In) 1996 we lost the best point guard in the country (Stephon Marbury), 1995-96 recruiting class. And we went to the Final Four that year. Let’s not get too upset about a recruit or two.”

Marbury eventually chose Georgia Tech, and thus has become the poster boy in Boeheim’s mini-rants about why top recruits are not the be-all, end-all of a program’s success.

Here’s the expanded version of Boeheim’s reasoning behind that:

“We’ve lost 50, 60 recruits over the years. We’ve gotten two commitments from very good players, which is pretty good. I think one thing that’s misunderstood in recruiting, in generic speaking, because I can’t specifically talk about any recruit, but when you decide to recruit a player and you’re gonna wait for him that’s what you do. You can’t keep other players involved because they want a decision. So you make those decisions as you go along,” Boeheim said.

“We made that decision 95-96, and we didn’t get the guard that we wanted. And the following year the junior point guard we had (Lazarus Sims) became a senior and we went to the Final Four, and that guard (Marbury) went to the NBA in one year. So I don’t think we would’ve done any better if we had gotten that guard, and we wouldn’t have been able to recruit Jason Hart because he would’ve thought that guard was gonna be here because in those days, players stayed.”

Syracuse is 4-0 with a mesh of elite recruits and a host of others that flew under the radar. The Orange is years removed from contending for the cream of the crop, but if Tuesday’s postgame shows anything, it’s that Jim Boeheim just doesn’t care as long as he’s yielding results.

“Geez, we’re still here,” Boeheim said. “There are no disasters that have happened … and we’ll be fine in recruiting.”

Published on November 22, 2016 at 10:29 pm

Contact Matt: mcschnei@syr.edu | @matt_schneidman