Syracuse nearly squanders 20-point lead, defeats Cal 90-87 in 3OT
Laila Phelia dropped 18 points on eight makes in Syracuse's back-and-forth win over Cal Thursday. Phelia was one of four SU players in double figures. Matthew Crisafulli | Contributing Photographer
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Felisha Legette-Jack hadn’t seen the game film yet.
How could she have? After her team’s 90-87 win over Cal — a triple-overtime epic that featured seven ties, 10 lead changes and 90 possessions — Syracuse’s head coach delivered an impassioned speech to a JMA Wireless Dome crowd of thousands and was immediately whisked away to field questions at her postgame press conference.
She had no time to digest what just occurred over the past two hours and 37 minutes. How it only took four minutes for the Golden Bears to completely erase the double-digit lead that SU spent 36 minutes building. How it was the Orange’s first triple overtime game in over 13 years, and first with a win since Dec. 4, 1998.
So no, she couldn’t have possibly diagnosed exactly what went awry in that fourth quarter, almost an hour removed from it.
“Nothing,” Legette-Jack said when asked what went wrong in the frame. “It was meant to be. I’ll watch film tonight, and I can give you a stronger answer, but I think what you go through is what you have to go through to learn the lessons that you learned at the end.”
There was something wrong in the frame, though, whether Legette-Jack knew exactly what it was or not. Teams don’t get outscored 25-9 in quarters where nothing goes wrong. They don’t shoot 21.1% from the field — and, comparatively, allow their opponents to go 8-for-15 — in quarters where nothing goes wrong. And teams don’t squander 12-point leads with three minutes and 57 seconds left in quarters where nothing goes wrong.
In its 90-87 triple-overtime win over Cal (10-9, 1-5 Atlantic Coast), Syracuse (15-3, 5-2 ACC) held a lead for 39 minutes and 34 seconds of regulation and watched it swell up to 20 points with a minute left in the third quarter. But the 26 seconds SU wasn’t ahead came in the dying moments of regulation — when the Golden Bears’ Naya Ojukwu hit a jumper to score her 20th and 21st points — and threatened to derail everything it previously built up.
Syracuse spent the next 15 minutes trying to undo the effects of that Ojukwu mid-range, desperately hoping to avoid a crumbling loss to a Golden Bears squad who’d lost three of their previous four games. In ESPN bracketologist Charlie Creme’s NCAA Tournament projections, the Orange currently slot in as a No. 10 seed. This game, a potential Quad 2 win where SU led for 83.6% of its duration, was not one it could afford to lose as it builds its postseason resume.
It was a test of the Orange’s resilience. These games — the ugly ones, where everything that could possibly go wrong went wrong — weren’t the kinds of games SU won last season.
But Legette-Jack will be damned if they don’t start winning them now.
“Efficiency, you know what? Analytics will look at that and break me down and say, ‘Oh gosh, this is awful,’” Legette-Jack said. “But the resolute team I got in that locker room, they’re gonna do whatever it takes to help us have success, so they can have that joy.”
Sophie Burrows celebrates with the crowd after Syracuse’s triple-overtime win. With Laila Phelia sidelined in overtime from injury, Burrows scored eight points, part of a 21-point effort. Matthew Crisafulli | Contributing Photographer
There were signs this wasn’t going to be as easy as one might’ve thought. Not even three minutes into the second quarter, Syracuse’s misfortune began, afflicting its captain. Laila Phelia, fresh off a career-high 38-point performance in SU’s win over Virginia Sunday, rose for a jumper and failed to find solid ground, crumbling to the floor after landing on a foot.
Legette-Jack rushed onto the court to help her star shooting guard, who was holding her knee in pain, and the Dome went silent as Phelia was examined. She walked off the court after a few minutes, helped by her coaches, and it seemed the tension that permeated the Dome was released for a minute.
Phelia was undeterred. On the bench, she immediately asked Legette-Jack to let her shoot the free throws for the technical foul she’d just drawn.
“Laila, your eyes, they’re not even looking at me, so stop,” Legette-Jack told her. “Take a second.”
Though Phelia would’ve preferred to have the opportunity herself, Sophie Burrows took — and sank — both free throws after her fellow captain’s exit. Then, she made two layups in quick succession to complete a rapid six-point flurry, desperately relieving some pressure for SU.
“You never like to see a teammate go down,” Burrows said postgame. “So obviously, we wanted to step up and be there for Laila while she couldn’t be on the court.”
It wasn’t long before Syracuse’s shooting guard was back in action. She returned to the game three minutes after her exit and finished the third quarter with 18 points, powering the Orange to a 53-37 advantage heading into the final 10 minutes of play.
But then she went dry. And, unlike her departure in the second quarter, no one was there to pick up the slack. Uche Izoje made two buckets, Dominique Darius had a layup and Burrows hit a triple in the fourth. No one else scored for SU.
“I thought we took great layup shots,” Legette-Jack said, referring to Syracuse’s fourth-quarter misses. “We had layups, and they didn’t go in.”
Ojukwu, on the other hand, singlehandedly outscored Syracuse with 11 points in the frame — and tied the game up with two of them. The game went to overtime, where the Orange watched Lulu Twidale hoist up two consecutive deep triples to equalize it at 74-74.
Then it went to a second overtime, where Phelia watched from the bench, effectively ruled out, as Olivia Schmitt tried to adjust to playing shooting guard — a brand new position — and Darius tied it back at 83-83 with a baseline layup.
“Resiliency. That’s what it takes,” Legette-Jack said. “When the play breaks down, you know, you got Liv playing (shooting guard). She never played the 2, but Dom had the ball, and so we had to coach her through the plays as she was out there.”
Then came a third overtime, where SU trailed for over 60% of its duration, and Darius — who entered Thursday averaging 4.3 points in her previous three games — sank a game-winning triple with 3.5 seconds left.
She’d been reamed out by Legette-Jack minutes ago for taking two outlandish, heavily-contested shots in a tie game. Before she hoisted that dagger into the air, waiting for it to drop, she’d only made four of her 16 shots on the day.
Thank God the last shot is the one people remember.
