Julie McBride stood in silence, searching for an answer as to why the Syracuse women’s basketball team’s dismal offense managed to score just 36 points and, more importantly, lost its sixth straight conference game.

‘Ask coach that,’ she said. ‘Maybe he knows, because I don’t know.’

Two days removed from Syracuse’s 56-36 loss to West Virginia in Morgantown, W.Va., on Saturday, a look of frustration still shone across McBride’s face. That’s because the senior point guard, who played nearly every minute her first three years and averages 35 minutes, spent half the game on the bench. She finished with just two points on 1-of-8 shooting.

‘It was just ugly,’ McBride said after deflecting to Cieplicki the question about her limited playing time. ‘That’s not my question. You need to ask coach that. It’s his decision.’

Cieplicki said he considers it a balancing act now that sophomore Marchele Campbell and freshman Tracy Harbut are back after being suspended for academics for the last two months.

‘How many small players can I have on the court at once?’ said Cieplicki, referring to 5-foot-4 guards Campbell and McBride and 5-foot-5 guard Krystalyn Ellerbe. ‘Something has to give somewhere, and that’s what I told all the players going into the game. If we are going to get everybody involved and try to keep fresh legs, then people are going to have to give up minutes.’

Harbut said neither she nor Campbell felt rusty in their first action since a Dec. 20 loss to Cornell. But McBride didn’t see anything too impressive.

‘I guess they looked good,’ McBride said. ‘We lost by 20 and we scored 36 points, so I can’t say anybody looked good.’

Though every Orangewoman saw action, and eight of them reached the scoring column, no one scored in double digits. SU (6-14, 3-7 Big East) finished with a 31.4 percent clip from the floor and missed all 12 of its 3-point attempts.

‘At times, we pass up good looks and are forced to take not-so-good looks,’ Cieplicki said. ‘If Chineze (Nwagbo) isn’t going to catch the ball in there and take it to the basket, if she’s going to kick it out every time, well then we’re going to shoot a lower percentage.’

Cieplicki said an example of Syracuse’s inability to take advantage of opportunities was that SU pulled down eight offensive rebounds but didn’t get many put-backs. SU scored just 12 points in the paint, compared to West Virginia’s 28.

Still, the Orangewomen turned in what Cieplicki considered their ‘best defensive effort of the season.’ SU held the Mountaineers (17-5, 8-2) to 14 points below their team average. And for most of the game, the Orangewomen were much closer than the 20-point loss indicated.

West Virginia clung to a 25-19 halftime lead, but three consecutive SU turnovers spotted the Mountaineers an 11-point lead. Though SU would rally to within seven points with 12 minutes remaining, turnovers and poor shooting opened the floodgates for a 23-6 West Virginia run.

‘Quite frankly, if we don’t turn it over for four or five lay-ups,’ Cieplicki said, ‘maybe the game is 46-36. This is going to sound crazy, but I really think our offense is still getting better in terms of our ball movement.

‘We could open the game up, run up and down and lose 90-65. And no one would say, ‘Oh, you’re not scoring enough points.’ Sometimes it might not look like it, but I’m still trying to give us our best chance to win’

But, unlike McBride, Cieplicki said he’s not searching for answers. Instead, he considers it a matter of properly executing the things the Orangewomen already know – boxing out, taking better care of the ball, setting better screens, catching the ball ready to shoot and simply making shots.

And he certainly isn’t going to let one player’s frustration change his scheme.

‘(Julie’s) got to let go of that,’ Cieplicki said. ‘That’s about her, quite frankly. That’s not about what our team’s doing. When you’ve been (coaching) long enough, you step away from that and say, ‘It’s just one player.’ I think if you talk to the team, as a whole, they’d say the looks were pretty good and the movement was pretty good.’

Published on February 9, 2004 at 12:00 pm