Boeheims key to deep Syracuse run
Listen to Jackson Thomas “Buddy” Boeheim speak, and he sounds very much like a coach, or a coach’s son, using phrases such as “evolution and growth” or bromides about how if you “think about that past game, then it’s going to bottle over into this game.”
Watch the kid known as “Buddy Buckets” play for his father Jim Boeheim’s Syracuse team, and he looks very much like someone described this way Saturday by West Virginia coach Bob Huggins: “He’s got to be, if not THE best, one of the best shooters in college basketball.”
The younger Boeheim will be coming off a 30-point game when he and the No. 11 seed Orange (17-9) play Sunday at Indianapolis in the second round of the Midwest Regional against Huggins’ No. 3 seed Mountaineers and their own guy who also already put up 30 this week, Miles McBride.
Buddy’s earliest NCAA Tournament recollection, albeit one he calls “a 2-second memory,” was celebrating in the family living room at age 3 1/2 with his twin sister and baby sitter while watching on TV as Dad’s team, led by Carmelo Anthony, won the 2003 championship.
“I just remember jumping up and down,” he said. “I didn’t really know what it meant, but I just knew that something good happened.”
As he got older and could tag along, Buddy said, “Being able to go to the tournament was the highlight of my year as a kid. Being able to miss school . ... I have so many great memories of March Madness and all the runs we’ve gotten to make in the past. It’s amazing to be a part of all of those and being able to go each game and each different venue.”
Like his older brother, Jimmy, who went to Cornell to play basketball, Buddy entered the family business at an early age.
But Buddy, who eventually grew to be 6-foot-6, wasn’t sure whether he’d be good enough to play for his father. And Dad, in turn, says now: “I always had reservations about him playing at Syracuse.”
Whatever questions either harbored were shelved after an AAU tournament the summer after Buddy’s junior year of high school, when he impressed college coaches from around the country with his 3-point shooting ability.
North Carolina coach Roy Williams “was sitting right where he was taking the 3s from,” Jim Boeheim recalled, “and Roy said, ‘You better take that kid.’ He was right.”
Now 21 and a junior, Buddy leads Syracuse in scoring at 17.7 points per game and by hitting 39.1% of his shots from beyond the arc.
He upped that to 70% — 7 for 10 — in Friday’s tournament-opening 78-62 victory over No. 6 seed San Diego State.
“He’s a phenomenal player,” West Virginia’s Jalen Bridges said. “So you have to look past the ‘coach’s kid’ part, because he’s obviously more than that or he wouldn’t be scoring 30 in the NCAA Tournament.”
The Mountaineers (19-9) have their own basket-filling star in McBride, who averages 16 points, 4.8 assists and 40.6% on 3s. He had 18 after halftime Friday to help beat No. 14 seed Morehead State 84-67 for Huggins’ 900th coaching victory.
Only five Division I men’s basketball coaches have more; Boeheim — or “Bo” to Huggins — is among them. They’re pals, going back to even before their schools were Big East rivals (Syracuse is now in the ACC; West Virginia’s in the Big 12).
“We kid each other all the time,” the 76-year-old Boeheim said. “He kids me about being old, and I kid him about being big.”
Just how far back do they go? Huggins was a senior guard for West Virginia in November 1976, when it beat Syracuse 83-78 in Boeheim’s second game on the job.
“Every time I see him, I bring it up,” Huggins joked, wearing a white “WV” baseball hat on his head and, in all likelihood, a wide smile under his mask. “He doesn’t want to talk about it.”
He and Buddy know each other well, too.
Buddy recounted the time he was 9 and ran into a carrot-chomping Huggins in the Madison Square Garden locker room while Syracuse was in the midst of what became a six-overtime Big East Tournament victory over UConn in 2009.