Syracuse’s Tiana Mangakahia pushed the ball up the floor midway through the first quarter on Thursday. She knew that Duke wasn’t going to make penetration easy, she said postgame. And she was feeling her 3-point stroke early. So, Mangakahia stopped and popped from the right wing. Swish. One of Mangakahia’s four 3s in the first half had the Orange off and running early.

The 3-point line was the story of SU’s first half. Overall, Syracuse shot 11-of-19 from 3-point range in the first and second quarter. And while that first-half shooting didn’t translate to the second half, Syracuse (19-7, 7-6 Atlantic Coast) hung on to beat No. 17 Duke (20-7, 9-5), 68-65.

“They played zone the whole game,” SU head coach Quentin Hillsman said. “… We talked about in our prep, we’re going to have opportunities, are we going to knock them down or not? … Is this going to be who we are and knocking shots down? We definitely took shots with confidence and made shots today.”

Before any of Mangakahia’s 3s, Duke’s Lexie Brown read the SU point guard’s eyes and jumped the passing lane early in the first quarter. Grabbing the steal and taking off in stride, Brown looked to have a wide-open fastbreak. But Mangakahia ran her down and grabbed the ball right out of the about-to-shoot Brown’s arms.

A quick spin the other way found Mangakahia leading her own break. And she found Gabrielle Cooper open on the right wing for a 3-ball, the first of SU’s 11 in the half.

Mangakahia made all four of her 3-point attempts in the first two quarters. Isis Young joined her with 4-of-6 from beyond the arc in the first 20 minutes, too. By Young’s fourth make, she threw a big fist-pump and clap combo into her post-make celebration.

“I didn’t want to miss,” Young said. “… I got the ball in some great positions thanks to my teammates, so it was pretty simple.”

The first half ended with Mangakahia sizing up her defender, again. This time, the threat of the 3 was as good as the shot itself. So, Mangakahia drove past her perimeter matchup. And as three defenders converged on her, she dished from the right side of the lane to Amaya Finklea-Guity on the left side. The 6-foot-4 freshman put it off the glass with her left hand, it dropped through with 0.8 seconds showing on the clock and the buzzer sounded almost immediately.

The second half started with one empty possession for the Orange. Then, Mangakahia spotted Miranda Drummond out of the corner of her eye on a drive. The 6-foot-1 forward caught in the left corner and knocked down Syracuse’s 12th 3 of the game. About a minute and a half later, she caught in the same spot, pump faked, dribbled twice and stepped back to the corner, again. Once more, she hit the 3.

But Duke wasn’t going away. Brown scored a fastbreak layup and a pull-up jumper. Rebecca Greenwell caught on a backdoor cut for an easy layup. SU’s 3s would have to keep coming.

“We came back, but we need to stay more steady,” Greenwell said. “We can’t be a streaky team … We just have to buckle down.”

Drummond’s next distance try was a miss from the right wing. Young missed from the same area soon after. Next, Mangakahia pulled up on the break, like in the first half, but it rattled in-and-out this time. Then Young, on an open look at the top, knocked it halfway down before it bounced out.

On the last possession of the third quarter, Young passed up a 3 and drove. She head-faked twice while she penetrated before lifting up a shot with her right hand. It rolled around the rim, tantalizingly, before dropping through. The bucket tied the game after three quarters and a mob formed around Young near the Syracuse bench. Just 2-for-10 from 3 for the Orange in the third had not put the game out of reach.

Between the third and fourth quarters, Hillsman took his dry-erase board as if to draw up a play. Instead, he drew a “really big” heart.

“We all really looked at each other and said this is it,” Mangakahia said. “We need to step up and take them or we’re going to sit down and let them win. So I think everyone thought about that for a second and realized that we can win this and it’s not over yet. We pushed through.”

But the start of the fourth quarter seemed to lack that heart and the game swung quickly to the Blue Devils with an 11-2 run to start the quarter. Included in that sequence was a maddening, back-to-back lane violation occurrence as Bego Faz Davalos shot free throws. She missed one, missed a second — but a Syracuse player stepped in early. She missed the retry — again an SU player stepped in early. Faz Davalos went on to make the fourth off her second mulligan.

The 3-ball hadn’t abandoned Syracuse, though. Drummond came down after a Hillsman timeout and made another 3 from the left wing. The threat of the 3 set up a backdoor from Mangakahia to Raven Fox on the next trip for a layup.

After the under-5 timeout, Mangakahia stripped a Duke dribbler and got a fastbreak layup, but Syracuse was beat down the floor by Brown for a layup of her own. Mangakahia came right back with a right-handed reverse layup as the shot-clock expired. Mangakahia hit Fox next for a layup to tie the game at 65, and Duke used a timeout while Mangakahia chest-bumped with Fox.

With 65s side-by-side on the scoreboard, Syracuse worked the clock. After running it down to under a minute with a slow-developing play, Digna Strautmane found Mangakahia open on the left side. And Mangakahia, for the first time in over 20 minutes, knocked down another 3, her fifth make in six tries.

“I was just trying to do what I’m doing,” Mangakahia said, “and I was shooting well, and coach Tammi (Reiss) said when you’re open, shoot it. And I took that opportunity.”

Duke scrambled on an elongated final possession that featured multiple offensive rebounds and two timeouts used. But the Blue Devils couldn’t knock down a 3 to knot it up, and the final attempt from Leaonna Odom came just after the buzzer and rimmed out anyways.

Syracuse’s bench players didn’t wait for the players on the floor to reach them. They ran out to the block “S” at center court to meet the players who had closed out the game.

“We can beat a team like Duke, who’s a powerhouse and has great players,” Hillsman said.  “At the end of the day, we understand that this is one more step toward what we need to do.”

Duke’s warm up T-shirts before the game said “4th quarter” on them, with no other message. In the fourth quarter on Thursday, it was Syracuse who sent the message and closed out the game.

Published on February 15, 2018 at 9:10 pm

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