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Jesse Edwards glanced at the group of Drexel defenders he was running through, then back at Joe Girard III bringing the ball up, and finally made eye contact with his point guard. He stuck his left hand out and started waving it. If he beat the Dragons back down the court, there’d be an opening — even if it was just a small one.

It was the 16-minute mark of the second half and the Dragons were within seven points after a made basket at the other end. Edwards hadn’t given his defensive assignment any space as he backed toward the basket, but Xavier Bell finished through contact anyway. Drexel, though, hadn’t sprinted back up the court, and that left enough room for Edwards to sneak behind its defense, corral Girard’s pass and slam a two-handed dunk through the net before blocking a shot on the next defensive possession.

Even though he’d allowed a basket on the defensive series, Edwards’ sound defensive positioning, plus the instinct to run the floor in transition, represented another flash of his offseason focus continuing to pay off. Through the first pair of SU games, they’d strung together too, and that was perhaps the most encouraging part.

For Edwards, his performance against Drexel — paired with his output in a season-opening win against Lafayette — took the strides he made at the end of last season and ensured they transferred over to the following year. While there are still areas of improvement, he’s no longer “not ready” like Syracuse head coach Jim Boeheim reiterated throughout last season. He flashed a softer touch on offense, an increased understanding of the 2-3 zone’s intricacies at the other end and the understanding how to not only fulfill his responsibilities, but create advantages for the Orange in the process.

That helped him push for the starting center job in the first place, entering offseason workouts off a postseason stretch where he played double-digits in three of five games. But after Bourama Sidibe suffered another knee injury in the preseason, with an initial recovery timeline of about a month, a window opened for Edwards. “I knew there was going to be absolutely a lot of minutes on the table,” he said on Nov. 9, and he made sure to capitalize.

Through two games, Edwards has shot a perfect 8-for-8 from the field, has a 28.9% block percentage and seven blocks total — which ranks second in the country, per KenPom. He’s meshed the defensive improvements with the offensive ones, the immediate fixes with the long-term tweaks that started when he arrived at SU in 2019, and together they’ve created a clearer vision of the center that Edwards was recruited to be. How Syracuse plugged Sidibe’s absence this year reflected a stark difference from how they needed to last year, and Edwards, carried by his offseason improvements, served as the primary reason why.

“He showed pretty quickly that he was developing in the right direction and they were really starting to think about him being in the starting role,” David Edwards, his father, said.

When Sidibe left the season-opening game against Bryant in 2020, it forced Marek Dolezaj to shift to center, a recreation of what would work — and what wouldn’t — on offense. It left the Orange without a true center height-wise even as Dolezaj’s presence as a facilitator threaded passes to shooting windows for Buddy Boeheim and Girard on the outside.

Even as Doelzaj played nearly 90% of Syracuse’s minutes last season, Edwards started to flash potential later in the year. He played 23 minutes against Miami on Jan. 23, scoring seven points and grabbing six rebounds, and that was the game he proved to himself internally that he could contribute at the collegiate level, David said. As March stretched on with the Orange’s postseason run, he played double-digit minutes in three of their five postseason games as his role within their system continued to evolve.

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“I try to bring my own skills into the game,” Edwards said. “I’m a little taller, I got some facilitating passes, but a little bit of different spots — low post instead of high post, maybe. And just bringing a little bit of different juice to the offense.”

Becoming a productive offense player was never the problem for Edwards, David said. He first needed to sharpen his level of productivity and communication within the 2-3 zone, and then, only once that situated itself, he could focus on expanding his offensive role, too.

After the season, Edwards had a few brief windows to travel between home and Syracuse. One came before SU started summer practices, then another in July before a family trip to Greece and a two-week span of practices with the Dutch national team, and within that range of days, Edwards knew he needed tangible evidence of offseason improvements to emerge. He returned home to the Netherlands to stay with his family, and for the second visit, his brother Kai — who Edwards had grown up developing alongside — was back from his professional season in Spain, too.

They drove to the national team’s practices together every morning around 10 or 11 a.m. and spent the next two hours working out with players who were more experienced. Kai and Edwards were both on the list of 24 players invited to practice in preparation for the European Championships or World Cup qualifiers.

Maurizio Buscaglia, the national team’s head coach, presented Edwards with different opportunities than he was used to at Syracuse, too. His role in the Orange’s zone was limited and rigid, but the principles of the national team’s man-defense allowed him to play more freely. Given his 6-foot-11 frame, he’d always align with the vision of a collegiate center, but Buscaglia slotted him at power forward, too. And with the Orange, a 3-pointer was never a thought that’d cross Edwards mind, but Buscaglia encouraged him to take it if it was open.

“It’s always interesting to have a different angle of somebody looking at you in a different way,” David said.

Because of COVID-19 protocols, the national team couldn’t play any games during the window Edwards and Kai practiced with them but they held two intrasquad scrimmages where they were paired on the same team once and as opponents the other time. As Kai guarded Edwards, and his younger brother scored a basket against him, he sensed, and saw, that he’d inched closer to fine-tuning what he needed to fine-tune.

Edwards gained between 10 and 15 pounds over the course of the summer, David said, and that increased body mass allowed him to become more physical in the paint, not biting too hard on shot attempts but trusting that he held the necessary defensive movements to recover and prevent easy lanes to the basket. When Jimmy Boehiem’s 3-pointer bounced off the front rim in the first half against Drexel, Edwards maneuvered around James Butler, wrestled the ball from Butler’s grasp, took one step toward the basket and layed the ball in.

He saw the early foul, turnover and missed free throw he had against Lafayette. Those were “the jitters,” he called them. “He’d never really been that guy where he’s suddenly like starting,” Kai said. “Already in the second game and stuff, he’s starting to look more and more comfortable.” For Edwards, that came via eight points, four rebounds, four blocks and one steal in 21 minutes against the Dragons.

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In the opening minutes of the second half against Lafayette, Edwards curled around his defender in the paint and raised his hand again as Girard scanned his options from behind the out-of-bounds line. A defensive foul after Edwards had grabbed an offensive rebound had given the Orange another possession, and Edwards elevated over two outstretched Leopards to catch the ball.

He brought the ball down, then quickly thrust it back up before someone could knock it away, and rose in the air before banking the shot off the backboard — displaying his increased rebound and scoring abilities all together in one sequence, and at the same time providing hope that it could keep emerging over and over again.

Senior staff writer Roshan Fernandez contributed reporting

Published on November 16, 2021 at 11:27 pm

Contact Andrew: [email protected] | @CraneAndrew