First Quentin Hillsman sent Taylor Ford to check in. Then Bria Day. Then Diamond Henderson.

By the time the second whistle of the second half blew, the Syracuse head coach motioned to all five of his players on the court. “Everybody out,” he repeated numerous times.

“It was a possession where they had too many offensive rebounds and people weren’t crashing,” SU guard Brittney Sykes said. “He got frustrated with us not having our effort when he just told us in the locker room to crash the boards and play hard.”

And the change worked. After SU went down nine points early in the second half, its subs rallied for the first nine points of a 12-0 run. That eventually stretched to 22-4, and No. 22 Syracuse (9-3) came back to blow out Cornell (6-5), 76-59, in the Carrier Dome on Sunday in front of 649.

Cornelia Fondren started the comeback with an old-fashioned three-point play off a rebound from a missed shot. Then Maggie Morrison hit a 3 from the corner 26 seconds later. Two possessions after that, Henderson hit an and-one and the game was tied for the first time in 16 minutes.

“That group turned the game around,” Hillsman said. “I thought they did a really good job of getting us playing fast.”

In the first half, Hillsman said his team was sloppy. It couldn’t find a tempo and was controlled by the Big Red, which was making crisp passes and hitting its shots on the other end.

Syracuse couldn’t get into an offensive rhythm, nor could it disrupt Cornell from its own runs. With SU down 21-16 and two seconds on the shot clock, Megan LeDuc caught an inbounds pass from the left key and swished a 3-pointer as the shot clock expired.

Hillsman swung his head away from the play in frustration, walking down to the other end of his bench as the Orange drove the ball up the court.

In the second half, though, the Big Red didn’t make a single 3. Hillsman said the Orange slowed down the Cornell offense and didn’t let it get the same good looks that it had in the first 20 minutes.

“We forced tempo on the offensive end,” Hillsman said. “We got the ball off the glass, we really pushed and got down the floor. We got some easy baskets, we got some layups.”

After Henderson’s three-point play tied the game, a Brianna Butler 3 gave the Orange the lead. Four minutes later, the lead had stretched to nine. The Orange is a team — armed with a roster of 3-point shooters and strong press defenders — built to make quick and forceful runs.

Last season it became a theme. Down 64-58 against Clemson on Jan. 23, Syracuse reeled of 18-straight points to punctuate a nine-point win. Three days after that, SU used a 33-11 run to pull away from Virginia after falling behind by 11.

On Sunday, Syracuse showed the contrast of its abilities for the first time in nonconference play. It’s capable of being the team that goes on a seemingly unstoppable runs, but it also has the capacity to be the team that turned the ball over 11 times in the first half against a much smaller Big Red squad.

“We weren’t really playing our game, weren’t really floor transitioning, wasn’t getting after it on defense,” Henderson said. “You just have to change your mindset.”

Hillsman said his team’s first two practices coming back from the holiday break were sluggish, and it translated to the first half, and even the first possession of the second half. His team lacked energy.

But the run, started by his reserves, was finished collectively by his 10-woman rotation and made those issues moot.

“In the first half we were missing chippies, we were missing layups,” Hillsman said. “We were missing shots we normally don’t miss.

“It was a different game in the second half.”

Published on December 28, 2014 at 10:02 pm

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