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Judah Mintz hesitated with his back turned to the basket at the right wing. He spun to his left, embracing contact from Chandler Jackson as he rose up from near the baseline.

Mintz launched into a somersault as the ball traveled into the basket, hearing the whistle before he finished his dismount. He sat on the floor for a second, smiled and peered at the camera. Why not?

“He must have gone on a run and scored 10, 12 points in a row, the same thing he did against Boston College,” head coach Jim Boeheim said. “He’s just as good as anybody getting to the basket.”

For the second straight game, Mintz’s aggression was impossible to stop late. He rattled off 12 points in the second half, reviving Syracuse’s offense in a 76-67 win over Florida State. After shooting 0-for-3 in the first half, Mintz went 6-for-9, earned three chances at 3-point plays and dished out three assists in the final period.

“In games and in life, you just have to keep plugging away,” Boeheim said.

Syracuse was in the same all-too-familiar situation on Saturday, down one against Boston College going into the under-8 timeout. Mintz had just checked into the game. Despite struggling for most of the night against the Eagles, Mintz said postgame that he knew Syracuse was going to go back to him.

The first task for Mintz out of the break was to lob the ball to Jesse Edwards. Mintz then waited for Joe Girard III to set a screen on Edwards’ man, throwing the ball up right as Edwards motioned to receive. The lob was perfectly placed, allowing Edwards to jog into the paint, jump for the ball and throw it down.

After Edwards blocked a shot on the other end of the floor, Mintz took control of the offense again. This time, he drove hard down the left side, taking a euro step to avoid one defender before he was met by another. Somehow, Mintz switched the ball to the right side of his body, flipping it to Edwards right behind the latter defender’s back.

Mintz then made a couple plays on the defensive end, poking the ball away from Prince Aligbe before grabbing another steal 45 seconds later, which resulted in an open look for Girard off an inbounds play.

By the next break, the Orange were up seven, with hold over a back-and-forth game that seemed to slip through hands time and time again. The freshman star, who SU relied on too heavily at times, took the challenge against the Eagles with ease, combining with Edwards to go on a 12-2 run that sealed the game.

“Our intensity was what really took us over the edge at the end,” Mintz said after the BC game.

Just like that lackluster first half against the Eagles, Mintz missed three shots from the field in the first half against Florida State. But some of the mishaps were in more emphatic fashion than what he couldn’t hit in Boston, as Mintz failed to convert on two dunk attempts.

The first came after Mintz cut in from the baseline and was met by the front of the rim when he brought the ball up. The other came in transition off a pass from Girard, when he slammed it off the back iron.

“Judah struggled early, missed a dunk, missed a couple of layups,” Boeheim said. “I told him, ‘you have to hang in there, just keep going.’”

Boeheim said Mintz is a competitive, fiery player who’s hard on himself whenever he’s not performing. Sometimes, he doesn’t want to listen to what Boeheim and the rest of the coaching staff are telling him. But once he does, it usually works for him, Boeheim said.

“I’m going to be frustrated regardless if I’m playing like that, missing easy shots,” Mintz said. “If I’m frustrated I don’t think that’s going to stop me from making the next play.”

With Syracuse trailing by 4 points and 13:47 left in the game, Mintz checked in. He noticed the Seminole defense was backpedaling to get back on defense, which meant opportunities for him to score quickly in transition. It took roughly 30 seconds for this realization to turn into result as Mintz laid the ball in after a Jalen Warley turnover.

Before one of his two 3-point plays, Mintz got to the charity stripe again, crossing over from the right wing and reaching the left side of the lane in only a few steps. Mintz switched the ball into his right hand, extended it and flailed in mid-air to sell the foul while the ball bounced in off the glass.

Mintz took off in transition again with eight minutes left in the game, trailed by Chris Bell from the left side of the court. FSU’s Darin Green Jr. split both players, eventually falling back to guard Bell as Mintz jumped and brought the ball off as if he was going to lob it to Bell.

But Mintz was simply buying time. Once Green made his movement, Mintz directed the ball off the glass instead, dropping it in to extend Syracuse’s lead to six.

Published on February 8, 2023 at 11:05 pm

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