Vasudevan: Syracuse is still missing pieces to the national championship puzzle
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Every successful lacrosse team is like a three-piece suit. All three units — attack, defense and faceoff — need to be in unison, or at least present. Otherwise, you’re just walking around with a jacket, vest and no pants.
Gary Gait can’t help but chuckle when asked about the third piece, his faceoff unit. He’s posed with the same question every Saturday evening, win or loss, and his answer doesn’t change. After wins, the faceoff unit’s performance gave the Orange enough momentum to put the game away. After losses, like this most recent 20-12 loss to No. 3 Notre Dame, it did the exact opposite.
“We didn’t really win many,” Gait joked.
Prior to this past weekend, Syracuse was much more confident heading into its final stretch against all ranked opponents. Gait said the team was ready to go hunting for some upsets, and for three quarters versus the Fighting Irish, the Orange looked like a more aggressive, efficient team. But something was bound to collapse. And for the fourth straight week, the faceoff unit lost the overall battle, winning just 2-of-11 faceoffs in the final period.
“It’s hard to not give up that lead when you don’t have the ball,” Gait said.
The struggling faceoff unit and inexperienced offense have derailed Gait’s second season at the helm of SU men’s lacrosse, a year after his return to his alma mater didn’t go as planned. The Orange want to compete for a national championship — Joey Spallina even said that was his main goal before starting this year — but they’re far from that.
Last year, SU’s underwhelming season sent it into crisis mode. The biggest issue was its goalies, Bobby Gavin and Harrison Thompson. Both couldn’t duplicate the talents or reliability of predecessor Drake Porter.
Gait and his coaching staff succeeded in filling that missing piece through the transfer portal. They replaced the second-worst save percentage in the country with the second best in Will Mark. The same urgency should’ve been there to find a go-to faceoff specialist, this season’s missing piece to the puzzle.
Like the Danny Brennans or Chris Cercys of Syracuse past, Jakob Phaup kept the possession margin close between SU and its opponents, finishing last season with the 11th-best win rate nationally. Bringing in Johnny Richiusa, who posted a 52.1% faceoff win percentage at Canisius, wasn’t the solution.
Gait’s tried everything. He kept Richiusa in for the first five games of the year before testing a Richiusa-Jack Fine tandem. This past weekend, Fine started for the first time and stayed in for most of the game. But nothing has stuck. Now, Syracuse has the worst possession time in the country, according to LacrosseReference.
The offense has improved, though. Gait wanted to “heighten the level of chemistry” last year, and bring it back to the level it was at when he played. That motive was ruined before the season even started with the loss of Owen Hiltz, and the offense became too reliant on Tucker Dordevic and Brendan Curry. Jackson Birtwistle’s talents were only discovered in the final four games of the year.
This season, the chemistry is better. Griffin Cook said the 2023 squad is more selfless with the ball. The assists are up from 6.57 per game to 8.90. Spallina’s ability to facilitate from X is a big reason behind this change, along with the addition of graduate transfers Cole Kirst and Alex Simmons.
The creativity and cohesion offensively was omnipresent against weak nonconference opponents. But against tougher competition, the attack’s inexperience led to Syracuse’s downfall.
“The last piece of the puzzle is to make plays on the field. We’re not there yet,” Gait said after the Johns Hopkins loss.
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Against the Blue Jays, the Orange’s freshman duo of Finn Thomson and Michael Leo gave SU a 9-8 lead after a no-look pass from Thomson found Leo at the doorstep. The recipe was there for Syracuse’s first ranked win of the season until everything got scrambled. Leo coughed the ball up on a surefire possession two minutes later. And on a final attempt to tie the game at 10-10, Kirst’s pass to Thomson was intercepted.
“We showed that we’re still young and that we’re growing and we’re learning,” Gait said.
SU bounced back from the loss to the Blue Jays with three straight wins, the schedule was set up perfectly that way. Its 56 goals were the most in a three-game stretch since when it scored 54 in 2021 from Feb. 27 to March 12. And the defense held Hofstra, St. Bonaventure and Hobart all under 10 goals, which hadn’t happened since April 2019.
Spallina tore through all of those matchups with at least six points in each game, including seven in his return to Long Island. He roamed freely at X, firing the ball to wide-open teammates near the crease or taking off on his own to score at tough angles.
Spallina was set to continue that run against the Fighting Irish, ready to set the tone so that SU’s attack could live up to better competition. But Notre Dame exposed the Orange’s reliance on Spallina, securing the win before Spallina had scored just one goal, and shut down the new No. 22. He finished with a goal and an assist in the loss.
There’s still time for Syracuse to turn this season around with wins over Princeton and North Carolina in the next two weeks. Still, they need at least another year for each unit to mature before making a deep run like Gait, Spallina and the rest of the team may expect.
For decades, the Orange were like Apollo Creed, the undisputed heavyweight world champion from “Rocky,” a mainstay in Memorial Day Weekend. A win over Notre Dame could’ve shown the start of a path back to the national championship, a return to the glory days of Syracuse lacrosse. But Notre Dame showed that SU is now like Rocky Balboa, a scrappy underdog who can deliver blows for three quarters before dropping the overall fight.
Anish Vasudevan is a senior staff writer at The Daily Orange, where his column appears occasionally. He can be reached at asvasude@syr.edu or on Twitter @anish_vasu.
