Syracuse 103, Oxygen Bassano 54: Orange dominate in Venice

After an eventful 69-59 victory in the first Italy game, the Syracuse Orange men’s basketball team looked a lot more impressive in game two. SU dominated Oxygen Bassano, 103-54 in Venice, while Buddy Boeheim scored a team-high 22 points.

SU got off to a hot start and earned a 21-9 lead after just one quarter. That advantage expanded to 49-18 at the half, and it was pretty much over from there — though the Orange still managed to casually put up another 54 points after the break just the same.

As mentioned, Buddy scored 22, which included five made three-pointers (a team-high) on 11 attempts. He was also 1-for-1 from two, and 5-of-6 from the free throw line to win MVP honors on the game. Four more Syracuse players also scored in double digits during the contest, including Jalen Carey (11 points) Bourama Sidibe (10), Quincy Guerrier (10) and Joe Girard III (10). Impressively eight different Orange shooters hit at least one three, as the team went 16-for-43 from beyond the arc in the game. Notably, walk-on Nick Giancola was the only player not to score for SU.

While the emphasis will be on Syracuse shooting pretty well from outside and overall (46% on the game), the defense really showed up here — especially in the first half. Oxygen Bassano hit just 29% of their shots and 18 field goals on the game. Also 12 points were scored at the line, and they were just 6-of-30 from three. Syracuse won the rebounding battle, 59-38 as well, with Sidibe leading the way with 15 of those.

Overall, nice work by Syracuse getting out of this one with an impressive win — which you can see the full box score of here, from Donna Ditota. Better yet, they avoided running into Mysterio or Spider-Man, so I’d say that’s a successful trip to Venice.

Next up for the Orange is a trek to Florence to take on the Siena Summer Select team on Saturday at 6 a.m. ET. That’s pretty early for everyone, so no gamethread. But we’ll get a recap up once it’s over. While you wait for that, enjoy captioning this.