Syracuse (15-6, 4-4 Atlantic Coast) will fly to Atlanta to take on Georgia Tech (10-11, 3-5) at 8 p.m. on Wednesday night. Yellow Jackets head coach Josh Pastner and Orange head coach Jim Boeheim both went on the weekly ACC coaches teleconference.

Here are three things they said about the matchup.

Fill it up

While Pastner did eventually praise Syracuse’s defense — which ranks second in the ACC in points allowed and field goal percentage allowed, only behind No. 2 Virginia — the first thing he mentioned was the Orange offense.

“They can really score the ball,” Pastner said. “(Tyus) Battle, he can flat out fill it up, he’s averaging 19 a game in the ACC. Frank Howard, he’s averaging 15.”

Battle and Howard are top 15 scorers in the ACC, as Syracuse is just one of four teams to have multiple players in the top 15. But as a team, SU is in the bottom four of the ACC standings, averaging just 70 points per game, and its 42.8 field goal percentage is the second-worst in the conference.

Block party

Pastner pointed out that both teams play similarly on defense. The Yellow Jackets and the Orange use mostly zone, and they have big-men to protect the paint.

“Ben Lammers has 19 blocked shots. (Paschal Chukwu) has 22 in eight games,” Pastner said. “Obviously both of us play zone, and we rely on some of those shot-blocking opportunities.”

Syracuse and Georgia Tech are in the top five of the ACC in blocks per game. SU is second with 6.1 while GT is fifth with 5.3.

Back to full strength

Syracuse and Georgia Tech share another similarity in their lack of depth. The Orange ranks last in the country with bench players only getting 19.8 percent of minutes per Kenpom.com. Georgia Tech is 220th in the country at 30.5 percent.

But both SU and GT had issues this year dealing with players missing games. Bourama Sidibe missed two ACC games and averaged just seven minutes through the first seven games. GT’s Josh Okogie was suspended by the NCAA for six games and also missed additional time with an injury.

Okogie has since returned to become the leading scorer for GT, while Sidibe unexpectedly played 31 minutes on Saturday against Pittsburgh and had a career-high 18 points and 16 rebounds.

“They weren’t the same team earlier, they didn’t have the players,” Boeheim said. “… Now they’re healthy and I thought they played great in a couple of their losses.”

Boeheim added that he doesn’t know how Sidibe is feeling after playing all those minutes on Saturday, because the team had a day off yesterday.

Published on January 29, 2018 at 12:39 pm

Contact Tomer: tdlanger@syr.edu | @tomer_langer