From the second seat on the Providence bench, Bryce Cotton gazed dejectedly onto the court, where the final seconds of a hopeless game melted away.

He closed his eyes. He shook his head. He opened his eyes. His head kept shaking.

Hard as he tried, Cotton failed to rid himself of the sickly feeling that accompanies unmet expectations. The Big East’s leading scorer managed just 10 points after pouring in 24 against Syracuse more than a month earlier.

“That’s as bad as we’ve played all year,” said Providence head coach Ed Cooley.

Cotton’s struggles embodied those of his team in a sickening 84-59 loss to No. 8 Syracuse that featured a 27-point halftime deficit and a miserable collective shooting effort. The Friars peppered the court with open shots gone awry, wasting good ball movement in the process, and suffered their most lopsided loss of the season after shooting 34.8 percent from the field.

They left easy points on the board from both inside the 3-point arc and beyond it, exiting the Carrier Dome with a performance Cooley said taught his players to “burn the tape and keep moving.”

Things looked grim for Providence from the game’s opening possession. Vincent Council sliced into the defense and dropped a perfect bounce pass to his teammate Kadeem Batts, only to watch him bungle a point-blank layup.

And that was just the start.

The Friars missed 12 out of 14 shots to close out the first half, falling helplessly behind as Syracuse surged in the opposite direction. A game that was tied 12-12 became a 27-point laugher, as Providence repeatedly misfired while the Orange just couldn’t miss.

“In the first half, they got four open shots and they missed them,” Boeheim said. “We got four and we made them. That’s 12-0. It could have been the other way and it would have been a different game. We were a little bit fortunate that they missed some easy shots.”

Adding to the Friars’ frustration was the schism between their quality of play on Wednesday and on Jan. 9 in the Dunkin’ Donuts Center. Providence shot 50 percent from 3-point range in a single-digit loss to Syracuse last month, fueled by a “scorching” start from Cotton, as Michael Carter-Williams put it, who finished with 24 points on 7-for-10 shooting.

But Cotton missed two days of practice leading up to Wednesday’s game, and the shots that typically fall for the player averaging 20.4 points per game suddenly would not. His first shot of the game clanged off of the back iron from behind the 3-point line in the left corner, and his only points of the first half came on a beautiful layup in transition set up by a diagonal bounce pass from Council.

That was as pretty as it got for Cotton and the Friars in a game they will soon want to forget.

“We always had a hand in his face,” Syracuse guard Brandon Triche said. “He might have had the same shots, but it was not in the rhythm of the game.”

Cotton’s teammates — a group Triche said consists of only a few “actual scorers” — were unable to pick up the slack. So, by the time Cotton finally hit a 3-pointer two minutes into the second half, his team trailed by 25. And by the time he hit another, the margin was the same with 3:24 remaining.

“We wanted to make sure we didn’t give him open looks,” Boeheim said. “And we did a good job with him.”

Cooley took him out with 1:10 remaining, and a slow jog toward that second seat on the bench began. The frustration of a sluggish performance weighed on Cotton, especially as he crossed midcourt, where three more Syracuse walk-ons prepared to take the floor.

The starters for both teams finished the game seated on the bench. But for very different reasons.

“They played a really good game, and we played a really bad game,” Cooley said. “The combination turned out to this result.”

Published on February 21, 2013 at 12:43 am

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