by Seth Davis
Boeheim likes to keep things simple. His office is not a buzz of activity. He does not spend gobs of time pursuing ancillary projects. On most days, Boeheim can be found in there leisurely reading the newspaper and watching the Golf Channel, or chatting on the telephone. He loves watching basketball on television, but he is not one to stay up until three in the morning studying video of his next opponent. During practice, he delegates much of the early drill work to his assistants, wandering upstairs to his office sometimes until they are ready to start playing five-on-five. He’s not a note taker, he doesn’t hoard his practice plans, and he doesn’t have drawers full of files bearing intricate plays. He scoffs at the whole analytics craze that has been embraced by so many of his younger colleagues. “I think a lot of that is nonsense,” he says. “I don’t need numbers to tell me which plays are working and which ones aren’t.”
Likewise, Boeheim prefers to give his players the bare minimum of information about their next opponent. He wants them playing with a free mind. “When we went into a game, we knew who the shooters were and who the offensive rebounders were. That’s it,” Hart says. While just about every coach puts their teams through game-day shootarounds several hours before tipoff, Boeheim has never done so. “We can show what we need to show them without leaving the hotel. I’d rather they get more rest,” Boeheim says. When I ask whether that gives opponents an edge, he replies, “We had the only winning road record in the history of the Big East. We won 61 percent of our road games. Nobody knows that.”
All of which is not to say that Boeheim doesn’t prepare. He just does it differently from most coaches. “I’m always thinking about basketball,” he says. “So even though I may not be having meetings, I’m thinking about things.” By the time he is done with all this thinking, he usually finds the smartest solution. “He can take the most complicated situation and simplify it,” McNamara says. “He has a unique ability to go over to someone whose head is spinning, calm him down, and say, ‘All you need is to do this.’”
As Boeheim watches his team play, slowly pacing the sideline with arms folded and his tie askew, you can see the wheels turning in his mind. It’s as if each game, each season, were one long hand of bridge. “He’s always trying to figure out the next move,” Hopkins says. For example, during a game at Providence in 2001, Boeheim’s starters were playing poorly and the team fell behind, so he put in the subs. Syracuse came back and took the lead, but instead of riding the hot hands, Boeheim put his starters back in the game. Hopkins was incredulous, but the Orangemen won. When Hopkins asked his boss afterward why he made the substitutions, Boeheim reminded him that they only needed the reserves to win that particular game, but they’d need the starters the rest of the year. He was already several moves ahead.
As the years went on, Boeheim merged his knowledge with his authenticity and landed on a method of coaching that uniquely empowered his team. For much of his career, he utilized the 2-3 zone defense more than many of his peers. The zone works so well for Boeheim because it is malleable. Though it is nominally a 2-3 formation, with two guards on top and three forwards along the baseline, it is actually an ever-shape-shifting alignment that is uniquely crafted to castrate an opponent’s strengths. When his team is on defense, Boeheim can study the intricate movements, discern the opposing coach’s strategy, and try to devise the appropriate countermeasure. “I like to say, if you have the pencil last, you’re gonna win,” he says. “If I have the pencil last, I’m gonna win.”
Boeheim’s teams don’t thrive because the zone is a better defense than man-to-man. They thrive because it’s a better defense for him.
At the start of the 2009–10 season, Boeheim made a momentous decision to commit to the zone full-time. It came as the result of an exhibition game the Orange played against LeMoyne College, a Division II school located across town. Syracuse played man-to-man defense that night, and even though it wasn’t going well, Boeheim stayed with it so he could see whether his guys could play it. Turns out they couldn’t. The Orange lost in a shocker, 82–79. After the game, Boeheim told his assistants that they would play nothing but the 2-3 zone the rest of the season. No switching, no wavering, no man-to-man, no matter what.
It is not a stretch to say that Boeheim is the most knowledgeable zone coach in the history of the game. He has studied it so much, thought about it for so long, and made so many adjustments over so many games that he will usually come up with the proper tweak that leads to a win. His peers certainly respect his knowledge. Over the years, Boeheim has estimated he has conducted more than two hundred clinics about his zone defense. “It’s the only thing I lecture on,” he says. Friends from all over call to pick his brain, and he loves nothing more than to spend long periods of time discussing the various intricacies of his creation. Problem is, other coaches may be able to get some ideas, but they cannot replicate the brain that maneuvers the amoeba.
Miami head coach Jim Larrañaga is a close peer of Boeheim’s, but even he didn’t appreciate the depths of Boeheim’s knowledge until he tried to adopt it for his program at Miami. Larrañaga and his assistants studied many hours of Boeheim’s zone carefully. “I couldn’t believe how many adjustments he makes,” Larrañaga says. “At one point I turned to my wife and said, ‘This guy’s a genius.’” Larrañaga recalls an instance where his own team was victimized. He knew from studying video that when an offensive center drifted toward the top of Syracuse’s zone, his defender usually followed. So heading into his game against Syracuse, Larrañaga directed his center to set some high ball screens in hopes of clearing out space. It worked, for a half. As the second half started, those passes were suddenly unavailable because Boeheim told his own center to stop taking the bait and remain under the basket. “I heard him telling his guys, ‘Leave him alone. He won’t make that shot,’” Larrañaga says. “And he was right. My big guys couldn’t shoot from there.” Syracuse won.
Mike Hopkins’s favorite example comes from the 2013 East Regional final against Marquette. It was an ugly first half, with Syracuse holding a 24–18 lead at intermission. In the halftime locker room, Boeheim spoke of how Marquette was using its 6´11˝ center, Chris Otule, as a decoy to contract the zone, which left a smaller forward, Davante Gardner, open for midrange jump shots. Gardner had nine of Marquette’s 18 points in the first half. So Boeheim told his forwards that they should play in front of Otule instead of behind him, which would allow the Orange’s guards to push out and crowd Marquette’s space. The tweak sent Syracuse to the Final Four with a 55–39 win.
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Boeheim may not be fond of long talks in private settings, but that doesn’t mean he is not empathetic. There would not have been so many players over so many years who have played so hard and so well for him if they didn’t believe he genuinely cared. Even Seikaly got over his hurt feelings, eventually. The two have been snippy with each other over the years—Seikaly once publicly questioned Boeheim’s coaching, to which his former coach replied that Seikaly “has been an idiot all his life and continues to be one”—but Seikaly is also the first to admit that the knowledge he gained at Syracuse propelled him to a successful twelve-year NBA career. And when the Orange won the championship in 2003, Seikaly, who was playing for the Miami Heat, chartered a jet to New Orleans, cheered on his alma mater, boarded the bus after the game to congratulate the guys, and then flew home. You don’t do that for a coach who lacks empathy.
Boeheim knows he is not good at dishing out compliments. This is part flaw, part design. “I’m not great at it,” he says, “but when I do it, they know it. If you do it all the time, they’ll expect it.” On the other hand, heaven forbid if someone else says something negative about one of his players. Boeheim will sometimes criticize a player to Juli, but as soon as she starts to agree and chime in, he’ll flip the script and say, “Well, he’s not that bad.” One of his more epic rants came in February 2007, when the Syracuse student newspaper
published an article that included an anonymous quote from a Big East assistant saying that McNamara was “overrated.” With McNamara sitting beside him on the dais, Boeheim addressed the matter during a postgame press conference at the conference tournament at Madison Square Garden in a most authentic manner. “Without Gerry McNamara we wouldn’t have won ten fucking games this year. Okay? Not ten!” he said. “That’s the most bullshit thing I’ve seen in thirty years.” McNamara’s mother later told him that hearing Boeheim defend her son like that validated his decision to go to Syracuse.
Making himself literally and emotionally distant from his players might make for good basketball, but there have been times when Boeheim separated himself too much from the operations of his program, and it cost him. He can be quite lax, for example, when it comes to enforcing discipline off the court. He argues that it is not his job to be the program’s policeman, but whether he likes it or not, his responsibilities to his players, his program, and his university do not end when practice does. This fault led to a second postseason ban in 2015, which the NCAA handed down at the end of an exhaustive ten-year investigation into Boeheim’s program.
Those episodes, however, paled in comparison to the storm Boeheim endured in November 2011, when his longtime assistant Bernie Fine was accused of sexually molesting two former Syracuse ball boys more than a decade before. The allegations came at the worst possible time, just two weeks after a more wide-ranging pedophile scandal exploded at Penn State, where a football assistant coach, Jerry Sandusky, was revealed to be a serial child molester, eventually ending the tenure of legendary coach Joe Paterno. Boeheim reacted emotionally to the charges against Fine. He simply refused to believe that this person whom he had known so long and so well was capable of performing these heinous acts, and he said so publicly. He might have been on safe ground if he had stopped there, but he went on to tell numerous media outlets that he believed the accusers were “trying to get money” by capitalizing on what was happening at Penn State. He later tried to walk back his comments, acknowledging he should never have questioned the motives of the accusers, but he did not apologize for supporting his friend. “I’m proud I did. I’ve known him for forty-six years,” he said a few days later. “We went to school together. I think I owed him a debt of allegiance.”
In the end, Fine was never formally charged with a crime. One of the accusers, a third man who spoke up after the ball boys came forward, later recanted, admitting he was a “sociopath” who took “a lot of pride in lying” and had never even met Fine. Boeheim no longer has any contact with Fine, who lives in Florida. He is understandably cagey when I broach this subject, but it is clear he believes Fine was innocent. “Nobody ever proved anything, so we still don’t know what happened,” he says. “But if he didn’t do anything, then he lost everything.”
All these punches to the gut would have floored a less persistent man, but Boeheim never lost his balance. He grudgingly went along with Syracuse’s wishes to announce that he would retire following the 2017–18 season and be succeeded by Hopkins. The plan got upended in March 2017, when Hopkins told Boeheim he was going to accept the head coaching job at the University of Washington. Boeheim was surprised but not exactly unhappy. “I feel good, better than ever, actually, and it’s still fun coaching for me,” he tells me. “I was fine with retirement, but I feel a little better about this moving forward than I did about being retired.”
It turns out he isn’t ready to be buried quite yet.
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I’m a contradiction in some ways, probably,” Boeheim says with a contented sigh. “I can be very sensitive with things. Very sensitive.”
This is what passes as profound introspection for him. It is now past midnight in that hotel conference room in Colorado Springs, and Boeheim is exhausted, yawning often and reaching under his glasses to rub his eyes. But he doesn’t seem to mind. He is, after all, a night owl. He’s happy to talk about basketball, about politics, about life, even about himself a little. Anything to keep his mind occupied.
While most of Boeheim’s colleagues are spending their summer recruiting or enjoying some downtime, Boeheim is leading a committee for USA Basketball that will choose a team of young basketball players to compete at the FIBA Americas Under-18 World Championships in Chile. This is how Boeheim relaxes—in a gym, evaluating players, lending his knowledge to build a team that another man will coach. “This is good therapy for me,” he says. “August is for vacation, anyway, so it’s not like I’m giving up time on my job.”
“But you’re giving up your vacation,” I say.
“Oh, I don’t mind that. Vacations are overrated. Anything more than a week is too much.”
He still loves to win, but he realizes he has mellowed. “The hardest thing in coaching is to be flexible but not weak,” he says. “Things are not always so black and white.” Those who know him best have noticed this change. “I’ve seen him evolve so much,” Coleman says. “His whole demeanor has changed, man. Even the way he dresses. And he’s so different at practice. When I was there, I didn’t even know my name at practice. I thought it was ‘You Fucking Asshole.’ He knows he can’t be as aggressive as he used to be.”
He still takes losses hard, of course. Juli tells the story of a particularly painful defeat that sent Boeheim skulking into the basement, where he spent a sleepless night reviewing the game in his head while playing mindlessly on his favorite pinball machine. He emerged the following morning, bleary-eyed and still wearing dress clothes, and joined the family for breakfast. When it comes to dealing with today’s players, however, Boeheim is not quite as aloof as he used to be. “The newer kids need more neck rubs,” Hopkins says. “He’s been able to adapt to that.”
Boeheim experienced a health scare in 2001, when he was diagnosed with prostate cancer. His doctor told him they caught it early, but it was still a disquieting moment. Boeheim’s mother had died of leukemia when she was just fifty-eight years old. His father, who was never one to maintain his health, also developed prostate cancer, but because it was so far along by the time it was discovered, he was unable to recover. Jim Sr. died in 1986 at the age of sixty-eight. He and Jim Jr. had learned to relate to each other well enough over the years, but only to a point. “He was a hard guy,” Boeheim says. “We were okay by the end, but we were never close. He was just a very stubborn, competitive, opinionated guy.”
It is a delicate balancing act, this constant teetering between his dad’s hardness and his mom’s softness, his understanding about life acquired while surrounded by death, the hard shell and the thin skin, the competitive edge and the empathetic intuition, the ability to suffer the losses but not the fools, all while enjoying a level of success and longevity rarely seen in the coaching profession. His persistence has proven out over time. “You don’t want to go through life not feeling things,” he tells me. “But coaches above all else have to be resilient. I mean, I’ve had bad things happen to me during the season. My divorce was right during the season. You’ve got to keep going. You have to be able to get through things. You’re always trying to convince your players that they have to go forward, no matter what happens. It’s like I tell them every year. When we’re winning and things are going good, you don’t find out anything about yourself. When you lose, that’s when you find out.”
There is no better example than Boeheim’s 2015–16 team, which lost five of the nine games when he was serving his NCAA-mandated suspension, began the season 0–4 in the ACC, lost five of their last six games, squeaked into the NCAA Tournament as a No. 10 seed . . . and somehow managed to get back to the Final Four, Boeheim’s fifth. It was a simple offensive tweak that sent them on their way. The Orange had ended the 2012–13 regular season with a horrific offensive performance, losing 61–39 at Georgetown. When they struggled again in their Big East tournament quarterfinal game against Pittsburgh, Boeheim called time out. He spun his wheels and arrived at a
very simple notion: When your team is having a hard time making shots, run some plays for your best shooter.
Boeheim drew up some off-ball screening action to get 6´8˝ junior forward James Southerland open. Southerland responded by hitting two quick three-pointers. That forced Pittsburgh to rotate more aggressively on him, which in turn spaced the floor and opened up driving lanes for the team’s two big, sturdy guards, Michael Carter-Williams and Brandon Triche. “It changed everyone’s mind-set because they were in attack mode again,” McNamara says. “The beauty was in the simplicity of it.”
Syracuse won the game, reached the Big East final, where the Orange lost to Louisville, and ended the season, remarkably, at the Final Four in Atlanta, where they lost to Michigan in the semifinal.
Sitting in that conference room in Colorado a few months later, Boeheim delights in pointing out that his most recent team reached the Final Four with more losses than any other school in history. It’s all about losing, right? Later in our conversation, he repeats that he “can be very sensitive with things.” Now it is my turn to snicker condescendingly. No, really, he says, it’s true. Why, just recently he got teary-eyed watching the coverage of Muhammad Ali’s death. He also tells me that he often cries during movies. “Did you see Love Story?” he asks. I tell him I haven’t. “Really? That was a tear-jerker. You should see it.”
This genuinely surprises me. “What’s the thing that makes you cry the most at movies?” I ask. Boeheim pauses to spin his wheels. He yawns. He rubs his eyes. He smiles, maybe a little, I think.