MIAMI – Syracuse’s head coach weaved his way through the locker room crowd to the back corner to take a seat next to his assistant coach, Mike Hopkins. An hour had passed since his team had advanced to its first Sweet 16 in five years, but Jim Boeheim wasn’t done coaching yet.

As the crowd dispersed from American Airlines Arena locker room, the attention turned away from postgame questions to the TV above the doorway exit, which featured Pittsburgh in a tight contest with Oklahoma State for one of the remaining Sweet 16 spots.

Forward Paul Harris asked Boeheim if Pitt would win. For Boeheim, the focus returned to coaching.

‘I think Pitt will be fine,’ Boeheim said, nodding with confidence.

Not surprisingly, the head coach, in his 33rd year, got it right. Pittsburgh triumphed over Oklahoma St., 84-76.

‘He knows so much about basketball,’ Harris said. ‘Even if we’re not practicing or playing, he’s always watching and he can name any school any player. He just knows so much about basketball, he just loves the game.’

Boeheim’s most recent win not only advanced his team to the regional semifinals, but it was also the coach’s 799th win, one away from a prestigious plateau.

No. 800 would propel him into an elite fraternity that only seven coaches have joined in their careers.

Boeheim could become the eighth on Friday when his team takes on Oklahoma. But staying true to form, he avoided the question regarding No. 800, and focused on his opponent.

‘It doesn’t mean a lot,’ Boeheim said. ‘We’re going to play the team that’s the No. 1 seed in this tournament if it weren’t for (Blake) Griffin getting injured. If he hadn’t got hurt, they’d be the No. 1 seed. That’s enough to worry about.’

The coaches already in the pantheon of 800 wins include some of the great college basketball coaches of all time. Bob Knight tops the list with 902 victories, while Dean Smith isn’t too far behind, earning 879 wins. Over the last couple years, the club has nearly doubled with Eddie Sutton (2008), Mike Krzyzewski (2007), and Jim Calhoun (2009) all accomplishing the feat.

‘Seven hundred ninety-nine, that’s a big thing,’ Harris said. ‘He’s catching Calhoun.’

And as Boeheim continues to move up the wins list passing legends, his players have taken notice.

‘We realize,’ SU guard Andy Rautins said. ‘We know the kind of stature he has in the game of college basketball is number of wins. He’s a Hall of Fame coach, but we really don’t consider the wins as we play. We just go one game at a time. I think that’s what he does and I think that’s why he’s so successful.’

Before becoming head coach in 1976, Boeheim played three varsity seasons at Syracuse where he played 76 games and averaged nearly 10 points a game.

After Syracuse, he played 136 games in the Eastern League, winning two championships with the Scranton Miners and Apollos. He became the head coach when SU was still known as the Saltine Warriors, and has been a part of 12 U.S. basketball teams coaching big name players like Christian Laettner, Alonzo Morning, Kobe Bryant, Caron Butler, LeBron James and Dwyane Wade.

‘He’s so intelligent,’ SU guard Jonny Flynn said. ‘Just to be able to make the in-game adjustments the way coach Boeheim does. A lot of coaches can’t do that, only the great coaches can be in the heat of the moment and make great in-game adjustments to put us in position if we’re try to stop another team from making a run to put us in position to win the game. He does that the best.’

Look no further than the same game that Boeheim earned win No. 799. Arizona State cut SU’s lead to four after the Orange had led comfortably for most of the game. Boeheim called a timeout and implemented a play to get the Orange’s wheels back in motion. Out of the timeout with 6 minute, 17 seconds remaining, Rautins hit a 3-pointer that sparked a 15-4 run and SU cruised to an 11-point win.

‘Late-game situations, he knows what to do,’ Rautins said. ‘Even throughout practices in things that he implements and points of executions in the game, they just work. He knows exactly what he’s doing out there.’

Many consider Boeheim the authority on zone defenses. His 2-3 zone has become synonymous with Syracuse. And when players, like Flynn, pester the coach to play more man-to-man, they always get the same response from Boeheim.

‘He says, ‘I’ve been doing this for 33 years,” Flynn said.

During his tenure, which has spanned more than three decades, the head coach has accumulated a national championship, led a team to an Olympic gold medal, was inducted into the basketball Hall of Fame, won 799 games, and was honored as coach of the year and Big East coach of the year. With all these accolades, Flynn deems his coach a ‘basketball wizard.’

Then again, the latter probably isn’t high on the list of achievements.

‘He’s called me some other things like this too,’ Boeheim said. ‘I think you have to take things with a grain of salt that young guys say. To him, that probably means I’m old.’

mibonner@syr.edu

Published on March 23, 2009 at 12:00 pm