Syracuse head coach Jim Boeheim appeared on his weekly radio show on TK99 on Thursday night at Delmonico’s Italian Steakhouse. He is currently serving an NCAA-sanctioned nine-game suspension in which he cannot speak with anyone on the Orange (7-3). It was originally scheduled for only conference games, but was moved up to nonconference games after his appeal and is still suspended for six more games. He can still go on his radio show, however, and on Thursday he spoke about a number of topics, including the state of his team, the role of interim head coach Mike Hopkins and the recently retired Wisconsin head coach Bo Ryan.

On 3-point shooting:

“We have to shoot the ball. I laugh a little bit, I hear things and moving around and everything when you’re not working. Nobody was worried about us taking 3-point shots when we made them. Now that we miss them, they don’t want us to take them anymore. If we had an alternative to go to, then OK, let’s go and do this or that. We don’t have that alternative. We don’t have anybody that can score inside.”

On Mike Hopkins:

“He is a tremendous coach. He’s not coaching his team. He’s coaching my team. They’re used to my words and how I coach. When he has his own team and has four to five weeks to get them prepared, they’ll get used to his voice. Two days, they’re not going to get used to him. It makes it difficult for anyone to try and take over somebody else’s team. I don’t think it’s easier or in some cases possible to do.”

“A dog herds sheep. You take that dog out of there and put a new dog in there and even if it’s a good dog, those sheep aren’t used to that dog.”

 

 

On Tyler Roberson:

“He got off-kilter. He’s not a great free-throw shooter, but he’s certainly not the kind of free-throw shooter based on that game (1-of-8 vs. St. John’s). I don’t know what happened. But he just, to me, he just didn’t play with confidence that you have to play with. He looked like he was going to miss it when he went to the free-throw line. He just didn’t look like he was confident. They basically were not guarding him too much. They were helping on the guards and Mike (Gbinije) and Trevor (Cooney). And he should score in those situations. That should be a big game for him.”

On using the press:

“We’ve pressed a little bit this year. But we’ve don’t got a lot of depth and that guy on the back line, Tyler Lydon, you’d like to have a shot-blocker back there. And he’s really not that kind of player. And you certainly don’t want people tagging him and getting him in foul trouble because we need him in the game. It’s hard to press. There’s not much pressing left in college basketball. Teams handle the ball pretty well and they can attack your pressure. If you to use it, we practice it all the time, so we have it. It’s not something we can count on in college basketball.”

 

 

On Bo Ryan’s retirement:

“He was going to retire at the end of the year, and I think that’s always tough to do when you’re in the middle of it. I think he wanted to have his assistant to have a chance to coach. He’s been with him forever at two different schools. I don’t think the athletic director was giving the assistant the job so he figured this way the assistant would get to coach the rest of this year and prove what he could do. Something like what Kevin Ollie did and Kevin proved himself and got the job at Connecticut. And I think that’s what the hope is at Wisconsin. Bo Ryan did an incredible job taking that program to where they’ve never been.”

Published on December 17, 2015 at 9:20 pm

Contact Sam: sblum@syr.edu | @SamBlum3