Rory Connor usually scores hat tricks with ease. But not against Syracuse.
Georgetown’s Rory Connor entered Sunday leading the nation with 4.50 goals per game but was held to just two against Syracuse. Aaron Hammer | Staff Photographer
Get the latest Syracuse news delivered right to your inbox. Subscribe to our sports newsletter here.
He gave UPenn seven goals. Notre Dame, with All-American defenseman Shawn Lyght, got four. Ohio State, with Tewaaraton-contending goalie Caleb Fyock, caught a hat trick. Richmond, then ranked No. 2 in the nation? They received six.
Death, taxes and Rory Connor hat tricks. The only guarantees in life.
The fifth-year senior has been the grim reaper all year, trading out his scythe for a lacrosse stick, handing out hat tricks to whichever victims are unfortunate enough to lay in his path. He was good at Colgate, where he spent the first four years of his career, but this season has been a whole different level. His 49 goals last year with the Raiders pale in comparison to the pace he’s been setting all season.
Through Georgetown’s first six games — four against teams currently ranked in the Inside Lacrosse Top 20 — Connor had scored six hat tricks. Entering the JMA Wireless Dome Sunday, Connor’s 4.50 goals per game ranked first in the nation. His 27 goals on the year ranked fourth behind Utah’s Luke McNamara, Loyola’s Mason Cook and Bellarmine’s John Alie, but that comes with the caveat that all of them had played more games than Connor’s six.
Ohio State’s vaunted defense couldn’t stop him. Neither could Lyght. Neither could the Spiders. What makes Syracuse any different?
Riley Figueiras, to start. The senior long pole blanketed Connor all game, holding him without a goal until two and a half minutes remained in the first half. Jimmy McCool did a pretty fine job, too. The senior goalkeeper saved 17 of the 29 shots on goal he faced, five coming from Connor’s stick. Working in tandem, their efforts held Connor to just two goals in No. 8 Syracuse’s (8-2, Atlantic Coast) 18-12 win over No. 13 Georgetown (3-4, Big East) Sunday.
It was the first time all year Connor had been held without a hat trick. His 22.2% shot percentage was a season low. His four points tied a season low. His five shots — and 55.6% shot on goal percentage — were pretty damn close to season lows as well.
But that’s nothing new. Figueiras and Dwan have made life difficult for attacks all season long. It’s a world tour, and Connor was just the next stop on the ticket.
“(Billy Dwan III) and (Figueiras) are as good as anybody out there,” Georgetown head coach Kevin Warne said postgame.
The performance wasn’t a Houdini act by any means. It’s impossible to erase a guy like Connor from the game completely. Syracuse head coach Gary Gait knew that coming in.
“He can score,” Gait said Friday, referring to Connor. “He’s got a knack for putting the ball in the net. We’ll do our best to cover him and limit those opportunities.”
Gait, mum as always, didn’t care to offer an exact diagnosis for how his team planned to approach Connor. For one, SU defensive coordinator John Odierna is the one responsible for putting the game plan together. For two, Gait never likes to tip his hand too far ahead of a matchup.
After being asked about Connor, Gait pointed out the answer he was about to give was the same clipped one he always gives to this type of question.
It’s about good team defense. If we follow Coach Odierna’s game plan, teams have a really tough time scoring.
Credit to Odierna, then, because whatever game plan he engineered surely worked. It took Connor nine minutes to find a shot on goal, a cheeky behind-the-back flick McCool kicked away from the net. His next one, just 42 seconds later, hit the post. Connor practically disappeared after that, up until that aforementioned first goal in the second quarter.
By then, the game might as well have been over. There were still 32 minutes and change left to play, but with a comfortable 12-4 lead, there was palpable certainty the Orange would win. Connor’s goal, which cut that deficit to 12-5, didn’t really matter in the grand scheme of things.
And that was precisely the key: make Connor irrelevant. McCool, like Gait, wasn’t naive enough to go into this game thinking Connor was going to be held off the scoresheet completely. He’s not Icarus, with the hubris of a man who thinks he can fly too close to the sun without consequences. He knew Connor — and his brother Liam — were going to get theirs.
“We’ve seen a lot of the Connor brothers specifically over the years,” McCool said postgame. “They’re two great players. They never quit, they go 100%, so we knew we’d have a challenge.”
But it’s a challenge SU was up for the whole game. Warne noticed it, too.
“Limiting and (making guys) earn goals is something every coach wants to do defensively,” Warne said. “If they’re gonna get it, they’re gonna earn it. And I think (Odierna) did an awesome job of just keeping us out of rhythm.”
Connor scored once more with two minutes left in the third, but he wouldn’t find the net again. He saw his first fourth-quarter offering blocked, then missed a nifty little five-yarder high and went radio silent over the final nine minutes of the game, rendered powerless against Syracuse’s defensive unit.
Warne’s been dealt a fair share of misery over the years. A Long Island native, he’s an avowed New York Jets, New York Mets and New York Islanders fan. So is Odierna. The two commiserate about their fandoms all the time, the squalor of rooting for a subset of teams that seem hellbent on causing their fanbases the most pain imaginable.
But Odierna couldn’t commiserate with Warne Sunday. Someone, no matter what, would be on the losing side. And since it had to be Warne, all he could offer was the miserable pang of defeat, hand-served by Odierna’s defense.
“I think you could probably talk to Coach Odierna,” Warne joked postgame when asked about the game plan SU used to stop Connor. “But again, John’s a very good coach.”
