Jan. 18, 2010
Recap | Box Score | Notes | Photo Gallery 
Notre Dame Men’s Basketball
Notre Dame vs. Syracuse
January 18, 2009
Purcell Pavilion at the Joyce Center | Notre Dame, Ind.
Notre Dame Player Quotes
Luke Harangody |Senior |Forward
On possession after getting down 2 and all the key possession…
“We had some key possessions, you know down 2 or down 4 as a group, and as a whole we didn’t make the best decisions. You know, there were a couple of times when I myself had a turnover. I pushed in a situation I shouldn’t have pushed it. I thought I saw something but I didn’t. Just decisions, boxing out, and key offensive rebounds for them put it away in the end.”
On keeping Syracuse out of the paint and second chance points…
“Yeah, they’re coming in every time and they have some big guys over there, but there is no excuse. We just need to get in there every time and try to put a body on someone and for the most part of the night we were coming up with those. But at the end of the night, the last 7 or 8 minutes, those were their balls and that’s the game right there.”
On decision-making at home…
“Yeah, I almost felt that we were making decisions that we make on the road, in a tough environment like that. We seem to be pretty poised here at home. I’m surprised with myself when I made that one decision. Coach talked about the crowd pushing us into making some decisions, but there were a lot of positives that came out of this game. Tim Abromaitis and Carlton (Scott) played great for us, and Jackson with 15 assists.”
Tory Jackson | Senior | Guard
On second half defense against Rautins…
“I love guarding him. Obviously I’m not going to go out there are score 30 points, but I do what I can to help my team. I’m guarding one of the best players out there, and one of the greatest shooters. I want to take that challenge. Get him off rhythm a little bit and get the momentum going our way. We had the momentum but he got a lot of good guys that picked him up too”
On Rautins size and driving to basket…
“Even then, he couldn’t finish the way he wanted too. He was dumping off a little bit and we need to get our hands active and stuff like that. We are going to be fine and are in a great position.”
On the elbow that you took…
“It was just one of those plays when he felt like a lot of people were on him. He didn’t mean any harm. He didn’t try to do anything bad. I was just in the wrong place at the wrong time and caught the elbow.”
Tim Abromaitis |Junior |Forward
On Tory being all over the court…
“Yeah, definitely, that was huge for us, and something that we had emphasized in practice, he did a great job of hitting the open man.”
On toughest thing about tonight…
“They were able to get the loose balls, the big rebounds when they needed them, and obviously they shot pretty well, and they are big, athletic guys.”
On the shift at half-time…
“I think they were leaving some lanes open for guys, and they did a better job of closing that up in the second half.”
On feeling unbalanced offensively…
“I mean yes and no, because we were getting good looks. Tory was getting a lot of drives. The short corner, where Harangody was getting a lot of touches, was open a lot of the time and we were just trying to take what was open.”
On the momentum fizzling….
“We had a little momentum going with those free throws, and felt pretty good, and then a couple of tough plays, a couple dumb turnovers, and a wild transition kicking off my foot. We really just couldn’t finish it from there.”
Carleton Scott |Junior |Forward
On where the game got away…
“Just rebounding. We definitely needed to rebound more, and stretch. We all took that question, and said to each other, `We have to rebound more.’ I think that is where we lost this game.”
On decision making during a close game…
“We know each other, and we play hard. Sometimes you get caught up in the moment, and for the most part, we are a mature team, and we know the right time to pick and choose our spots.”
Syracuse Head Coach Jim Boeheim
On how they responded when Notre Dame rallied…
“It’s very difficult to lose a lead on the road, we did it here and we did it at West Virginia, but they came back, they made some great plays, that’s when they got back in it. We couldn’t do anything with (Tory) Jackson on offense, he was just getting by us in the lane and making great passes, I mean great passes… but when it was tied, we made two or three great offensive plays, and Chris Joseph got two offensive rebounds on the missed free throws, and that was the difference in the game.”
On how Syracuse can continue to improve…
“There’s always things we have to work on… we didn’t rebound well in the first half at all, we didn’t do a good job of finding our players a couple times, and we let Tory Jackson get away way too many times… But those are not nit-picking, those are big things. We overcame them because we shot well.”
Syracuse Player Quotes
Wesley Johnson | Junior | Forward
On the performance of Syracuse’s offense…
“We really felt like we could dominate the boards and get up and down the floor quickly. In the second half we were getting into a little kind of rhythm and we were able to score. We really just tried to play within ourselves.”
On how he felt about the fact that this was a Big Monday game and if he felt he stepped up…
“Well definitely we felt that we were going to be tested tonight. Coming in here to Notre Dame, a road game right after West Virginia, we knew tonight was going to be a great test, so we took that into consideration and came out with a win.”
On Syracuse’s recent road success…
Yeah, you know, Coach Boeheim was letting us know that not a lot of Syracuse teams have been able to have streaks like this and that we really need to play hard every game.
Kris Joseph | Sophomore | Forward
On how Syracuse was able to prevent Notre Dame from scoring a lot of points…
“Yeah we really wanted to get out on the shooters. We had to make an adjustment in the second half, you know Notre Dame kept making threes and in the second half we were able to make that adjustment.