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They traded shots. Joe Girard III and El Ellis went mano a mano down the stretch. A game that wasn’t supposed to be close at any point, a 2-12 Louisville team middling through its 2022-23 season was supposed to take its licks from a 9-5 Syracuse team and move on with another conference loss.

But when Girard stood at the free-throw line with 17.2 seconds left, the Orange held just a one-point lead. He nailed both after a missed baseline jumper from Jae’Lyn Withers, giving Syracuse a three-point lead. Girard and Judah Mintz traded fouls as a way to drain the clock and send Ellis to the free-throw line with 8.2 seconds remaining. Then chaos.

Mintz collected the inbound pass, stormed up the court and slipped, coughing up the ball. A frantic Ellis picked it up, sprinted down the court and lost the ball himself as Jesse Edwards poked it from behind. Benny Williams fell trying to get the ball and the clock expired as he threw the ball out.

“We almost played perfectly down the stretch,” head coach Jim Boeheim said.

Louisville came into Tuesday night with a 2-12 record after starting an abysmal 0-9 and sinking — at one point — to the third-worst team in college basketball. It’s a team in transition trying to remake itself under first-year head coach Kenny Payne. It has playmakers, like Ellis, who averages 17.5 points per game, but has lost three games to mid-major schools at home and hadn’t picked up its first Atlantic Coast Conference win. Syracuse, meanwhile, won six of its last seven after a bad first seven games that got the Orange off to a 3-4 start.

When it has trailed at half this season, Syracuse is 0-2. It trailed by a single point heading into halftime after a fadeaway jumper at the buzzer gave the Cardinals a 35-34 lead. But it couldn’t pull ahead in the second half and the Orange (10-5, 3-1 ACC) battled to the last possession in order to put away Louisville (2-13, 0-4 ACC).

“I’m just very thankful that Joe Girard didn’t want to lose the game,” Boeheim said.

Syracuse has gotten used to being the young team in each game this season, the team full of underclassmen who are expected to make mistakes, turn the ball over and prematurely end possessions with ill-advised shots. It’s also used to getting off to slow starts, an early-season trend that has led to some puzzling upsets and forced the Orange to use a late-game run in order to surge back and regain a win. Their first-half defense, especially inside the paint, has been a black eye, especially because teams have been able to consistently go into the 2-3 zone behind Edwards and create close-range shooting opportunities.

That slow start seemed to fade away during a massive run from Syracuse midway through the first half, but the Orange couldn’t shake the Cardinals and went into the halftime break down one point after a fadeaway shot from Brandon Huntley-Hatfield rattled in at the halftime buzzer.

“We made some really bad turnovers to get down, then we fought back. Then we made a couple bad turnovers,” Boeheim said.

Another slow start from Louisville began in the opening four minutes of the game, capped off by two missed free throws from Sydney Curry before the under-16 timeout in the first half. Then, a 3-pointer from Mike James from the right edge catalyzed a prolific run for Louisville that firmly cemented its hold on the game. The Orange, who suffered from turnover issues against Boston College, started playing sloppily against the Cardinals. First, Girard slipped coming around the corner and pivoting for a pass from Mintz. Then, Williams pulled up from the baseline and missed a jumper, and Girard’s pass over to Chris Bell was off-target and bobbled out of bounds.

The Cardinals uncorked a 13-0 run before Mintz nailed a contested jumper, cutting the Orange’s early deficit to 19-12. Syracuse couldn’t hit anything, nor could it stop the three turnovers that it committed during Louisville’s run or regain a hold of the game. So Boeheim opted for a different lineup. Mounir Hima and Justin Taylor came in before Maliq Brown subbed in to replace both forwards. Only Mintz and Girard remained in the game in the starting lineup during a mid-half 10-0 run that allowed the Orange to retake the lead.

Coming out of the halftime break, the Orange needed a burst, something to breathe life into a questionable performance through 20 minutes. Instead, Syracuse traded baskets with the Cardinals and barely got its head above water. It even went on a nearly three-minute scoring drought after the under-16 timeout in the second half that Girard finally ended when he drove, faked a pass outside and finished with a layup to tie the game at 45 apiece. The Orange would force a missed 3 from Kamari Lands, but be short on a 3 attempt of their own, stop a layup attempt from Withers, but commit a turnover or draw a foul.

“We’re halfway through, almost, and we’re just not playing good enough,” Boeheim said.

The broadcast on ESPN News summed up Mintz’s season minutes before tip off. “He’s maturing right before our eyes.” The freshman out of Oak Hill Academy earned the starting point guard role over the summer, taking over for Girard. Though he has struggled on 3-point shooting, Mintz has quelled Boeheim’s early-season critiques of being unable to generate a great deal of scoring chances for the rest of the team, especially Girard. Through the first few games, Boeheim pointed to Mintz’s lack of assists as a clear area to improve on for the point guard in his first year at the top of Syracuse’s offense.

Girard is established, and when he’s not on a cold streak like he was toward the end of the Empire Classic earlier this year, he’s as reliable a scorer for Syracuse as anyone. It was clear, then, as during a questionable first half Boeheim was changing his lineups more than he has during a game all season, that Mintz and Girard became the only two to play the entire half. They combined to finish the first half with 21 points, while the other seven players combined for just 13, ending the evening with a combined 44 points.

“I just can’t get over how good Joe was tonight, how determined he was,” Boeheim said.

The rest of the team just couldn’t play well enough to separate from Louisville. Edwards, who once again found himself in foul trouble, finished with a double-double, but frequently let up layups in the lane or missed close-range opportunities. Williams and Bell — though he scored eight points — retreated back into irrelevance on the court. Taylor chipped in when he could, but only connected on 1-of-3 shots.

The Orange stayed close by finding their way to the free-throw line during the second half, keeping the game within five points. But for six minutes in the second half, they didn’t make a field goal. For once, the cold streak didn’t sink the Orange — a much worse-shooting Louisville team couldn’t break open a lead down the stretch in the second half. Instead, the cold streak placed the Orange just far enough behind the Cardinals that Louisville nearly won.

“The last three games, we just haven’t been good enough. We’ve won a couple of them, but we don’t seem to be getting better,” Boeheim said.

Published on January 3, 2023 at 9:22 pm

Contact Anthony: [email protected] | @anthonyalandt