SOUTH BEND, Ind. — Micah Shrewsberry keeps sifting through his lineup, searching for any kind of consistent combination of points and defense to help buoy his team until his star returns.
It’s been a moving target to date and is likely to stay that way, but his Notre Dame men’s basketball squad stumbled onto enough spurts on both ends of the floor in Saturday’s noon game in Purcell Pavilion to hold off Syracuse, 69-64, in an ACC opener for both teams.
It was ND's first ACC-opening win since the 2017-18 season.
There was mostly relief and probably, as Shrewsberry said, a burst of belief, too, as the 5-5 Irish ended a five-game losing streak, four of those losses coming down to the final minutes.
Just as the Irish are missing Markus Burton’s commanding presence and 18 points a game with a knee injury, so is the 4-4 Orange without JJ Starling, an Irish transfer who was averaging 19 points before breaking his left hand in practice last Monday.
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The Irish were picked to finish 10th and Syracuse 11th in the 18-team ACC preseason poll.
“This was just a battle of wills and different guys just stepped up on both sides,” Shrewsberry said. “We needed to be in a close game and we needed to win a close game to just start building some belief back.”
The game never moved the needle on the pretty meter, and there were plenty of groans from the crowd of 6,200 — about 1,500 over the season average — following Shrewsberry’s plea this week to fans for a better turnout for the league opener.
There were 40 fouls, 51 free throws shot — and 18 missed (ND was 17-for-27, 63%) — to go along with 28 turnovers.
Notre Dame had 15 of those turnovers with five, oddly, coming because of footsteps on the side out-of-bounds line.
The Orange — hardly a great shooting team from the 3-point line at 28% coming in — was 0-for-9, five of those attempts coming in the second half. It’s the first time since November of 2014, against Holy Cross, that Syracuse has gone without a made 3 in a game.
For ND to survive, someone needed to step up with some points to help the only two double-digit scorers in the lineup, in Braeden Shrewsberry (15.2) and Tae Davis (14.4).
The surprise was 6-7 J.R. Konieczny, the former South Bend Saint Joseph High star, who averaged almost eight points and 23 minutes as a sophomore, but had fallen out of favor and was averaging four points and 13 minutes through the first nine games.
His chance came, per Shrewsberry, because of practices leading up to the game.
“JR's energy was so great yesterday,” Shrewsberry said of Friday’s practice. “How I judge who plays and who doesn't play is usually off of practice. You practice well, you're gonna play, because you're building trust. You're telling me, ‘Man, I'm ready to go…’
“The way he practiced yesterday was just like he played today. And we’ve got to keep talking to him. We’ve got to keep harping on it [energy]. But when he plays with that energy, it's huge for us. We need that boost from him.
“Whether it's rebounding, whether it's scoring, whether it's defending, whatever it is, he's big for us. And I thought he was awesome tonight.”
He certainly was in the first half, averaging a point a minute and leading the Irish with 13 (6-for-9 shooting) to help them to a 30-26 edge.
Among the big first-half plays was a slam dunk that brought the Purcell crowd to life.
During postgame comments, Konieczny said he didn’t remember much about it, but his teammate, center Kebba Njie, did.
“I remember. You went baseline, then BOOM!” said the 6-11 Njie, who obviously was impressed.
Konieczny finished with 15 points, four rebounds and no turnovers in his 28 minutes.
Njie, averaging 6.7 points, had a dunk among his nine points to go with nine rebounds and solid defense as Syracuse hammered the paint with seemingly every possession.
“I challenged him the other day about his physicality, right in front of our whole team in the film room,” Shrewsberry said of Njie. “It was about: for us to take another step, he needed to be more physical with how he was playing. I thought he did that [Saturday].
“[6-11, Eddie] Lampkin’s a huge man. He's a monster in there, in the paint. And I thought [Njie] did a good job guarding him. I thought he did a good job rebounding, a good job setting really, really hard screens and getting people open. And in turn, it helped him get open for a couple things.”
There were eight ties and eight lead changes, the majority in the second after the Irish led for 18 minutes of the first half.
The Irish shot a respectable 45% from the field, but there was nothing smooth about it, with the team generating only seven assists. The Orange had 13 assists and shot 47%.
The surge for the Irish came after Syracuse’s 6-7 senior Jyare Davis, who finished with 20 points, dropped in a 10-footer to tie the game at 60 with 3:35 to go.
Eleven seconds later, Braeden Shrewsberry found himself all alone at the 3-point line. He even looked surprised to see no defender near him. He took time to set his feet and drilled the 3, the first of two open looks for 3s over the final three minutes.
His second 3 came at the 2:09 mark. It gave the Irish a 67-62 lead and Shrewsberry a career-high-tying 25 points for the game — 18 in the second half. He finished 8-for-15 overall and 6-for-11 on 3, well above his 32% mark from the arc coming in.
“We lost him a couple of times [late in the game],” said Syracuse’s second-year coach Adrian Autry of Shrewsberry.
“Too many turnovers [13 total] and too many defensive breakdowns were very glaring at the end of the game.”
Autry also lamented that his club’s free-throw shooting continued to be an issue. The Orange came in at 67.7% and didn’t improve any after a 16-for-24 (66.7%) effort for the game.
ND’s 6-9 Davis fought foul trouble for a big part of the afternoon and his defense was missed when he had to sit. He still had a productive day in his 21 minutes [he averages 27.5] with 15 points on 6-for-8 shooting, two rebounds and two steals.
Irish guard Matt Allocco, one of the country’s top shooters coming out of Princeton as a transfer, has had few games as frustrating as Saturday’s.
Playing the point for 33 minutes, he was 0-for-3 from the field, 4-for-8 from the line with four turnovers and just one assist. He came in shooting 47% from the 3-point line and 87.5% from the free-throw line.
“We needed to see the ball go through late in the game,” Shrewsberry said of his team. “We need to, like, get two hands on the rebound late in the game.
“We need to make a couple free throws late in the game, just so they feel like, ‘Man, we can do this. We can do this without Markus. We can do this. We can still pull one out in different ways, right?’
“Whether we need to be tough and gritty, whether we need to score, we could still do it without him. And now I think that's going to make us even better when he gets back.”
Burton has been called week-to-week, but there is no timetable for his return.
Notre Dame hosts Dartmouth at 7 p.m on Wednesday.
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