(Inside Lacrosse Photo: Bobbie Arlotta)

Last Tuesday night during Syracuse’s 15-8 win over Cornell, former Syracuse All-American Kevin Rice tweeted about his alma mater’s offense pondering:

I wonder how many weeks it'll take for someone to pole Nick Mariano — Kevin Rice (@kevinrice_2) April 11, 2017

After Syracuse shuffled its lineup to move Brendan Bomberry to attack and Nick Mariano back to the first midfield, where he played all of last season, the answer is apparently four games, as North Carolina was the first team to consistently bump a close defender up to double pole the Orange midfield.

We know that it’s something that can work against them, as it’s what the Maryland defense did to them during last year’s NCAA Quarterfinals when they bumped Isaiah Davis-Allen down to guard Jordan Evans so that a close defender could guard Mariano. For most of the first three quarters against UNC, it seemed to be the answer as well. Before getting into the UNC game and the adjustments, let's explore the four-game stretch leading up to it where

In general, the two most important matchups that decide the outcome of settled possessions are the top offensive player, usually an attackman, against the defense’s top cover defender and the matchup of the second-best dodging midfielder against shortstick defensive midfielders. With Sergio Salcido on the first midfield to draw the pole, shifting Mariano back to midfield has him usually matched up against a SSDM, and he has been feasting against those matchups.

Mariano creates such problems when matched up against a shortstick because of the way he is able to shoot so effectively with a shortstick defender bodying up on him. Defenses are either slow to slide or don’t slide at all because it looks like the on-ball defender is right with him.

The effect has cascaded down to the entire unit. With Mariano at attack for the first six games, Syracuse scored on 34.2% of its offensive possessions with an opponent adjusted offensive efficiency 34.7%. However, over the next four games with Mariano at midfield against a tougher slate of defenses, Syracuse scored on 39.7% of possessions, adjusted offensive efficiency 45.3%. Both would be best mark in the country.

If that doesn’t seem like a substantial increase, consider that the national average efficiency is 28.6%, which means that the Syracuse offense went from 6.1% better than average to 16.7% better than the national average. Also consider that ending a possession in a goal rather than a turnover or a shot that ends up in the goalie’s stick has the compounding impact of resulting in a face-off rather than the other team gaining possession.

There are a couple of different ways that Mariano is so effective against shortstick defenders. The first and the one that I would be most concerned about if I were an opposing defensive coordinator is his ability to shoot the ball fading away from the goal coming around from X:

It's virtually impossible for a shortstick defender to do anything about since it doesn’t really require him to truly beat them on a dodge by more than maybe half a step since he can get it off with the defender between him and the goal while being pushed. It’s also from close enough with the defender as at least a partial screen leaves the goalie with little chance to do anything other than get lucky. If there is the threat of such a shot, the defense really needs to send a slide in time to stop it.

The next most dangerous thing he does is sweep topside to his left hand from the wing. If I put on my defensive coordinator hat, this isn’t as dangerous to me because solid on-ball defender should be able to stop it, and while it’s not a shot you want to give up, at least it gives your goalie a chance. He’s such a good shooter that letting him rip it from 12 yards out, even on the run with a shortstick defender on him, isn’t a save you necessarily expect your goalie to make, but at least you give him a chance.

However, just like when he’s coming around to his left from X, even if there is a shortstick defender bodying up on him, the defense should be sending the slide.

Finally, just because a shortstick defender can deny Mariano topside to his left doesn’t mean that he’s not a threat to score. He can get underneath or roll back to his right and beat you as well.

The Syracuse offense was actually taking fewer shots per game during those four games, just 37.3 per game compared to 40.2 per game over the first six. However, they’re actually putting slightly more of them on goal, 23.3 vs. 22.8 while opposing goalies are saving just 40.9% compared to 46.7% over the first six games. In other words, the quality of the shots that they’re taking has gone up tremendously.

Mariano’s shooting was a huge reason for that. Over the first six games, he went from 12 goals on 38 shots, 25 of which were on goal, to 14 goals on just 26 shots with only 16 of them on goal over the next four games while cutting his turnovers down from 11 to just three.

Defenses occasionally got too focused on sliding to Mariano and botched second slide assignments leading to fairly easy assists for him as well:

However, when the slide packages were reasonably well executed, defenses saw fairly consistent success forcing Mariano to be a passer and flushing the ball out of his hands. In particular, that was part of how Cornell kept things close with the Orange in the first half of their game:

Picking up assists directly isn’t the only way that draw a slide can set up offensive success, but I couldn’t find a good example of Mariano drawing a slide that lead to a goal either on a hockey assist or indirectly by resulting in a short stick matchup for Salcido or Solomon.

It wasn’t just Mariano’s shooting that got better with his switch to midfield. Brendan Bomberry didn’t score more often at attack, but the shots he was taking became more lethal. He went from 13 goals on 24 shots on goal in six games at midfield to seven goals on eight shots on goal during the next four games at attack. A major part of that was due to being on the field for more uneven situations in transition.

How good is Bomberry at scoring goals in situations where his team has more players than the other team has defenders? Last year at Denver, he was on a man-up unit with Connor Cannizzaro, Zach Miller and Tyler Pace, and he scored more man-up goals than all three of them combined. Playing at attack put him on the field for fast breaks and unsurprisingly, Bomberry is just as good at scoring in 4v3 situations as he is in 6v5 ones.

During its game this past Saturday, UNC defense countered by simply reverting its primary coverage assignments back to the way they would have been if Mariano was at attack and Bomberry was a midfielder by short-sticking Bomberry and bumping a close defender up to guard Mariano.

Mariano is of course capable of dodging against longpoles and getting off shots. Though the sample size vs UNC was small, both the eye test and the results seem to suggest they’re not nearly as good as the ones he was able to take against shortstick defenders.

The result was that the Syracuse offense was only able to score one goal in settled, even situations with the first midfield on the field that came when Salcido toasted a UNC defender with a swim move.

Nate Solomon was able to create a goal and an assist for the Orange during the third quarter, but they still found themselves down 10-6 with about four minutes left. Likely making the determination that they needed more of a dodging threat at attack, the Syracuse coaching staff put in Stephen Rehfuss who put up a pair of goals and assists in the second half against Cornell. Rehfuss scored or assisted four straight goals dodging against UNC SSDMs to tie the game up at 10.

Even with his dodging threat largely neutralized, Mariano was able to score twice in the second half working as an inside finisher on feeds from Solomon and Rehfuss:

With Rehfuss on the field as a dodging threat, the Syracuse offense once again looked like potentially the most formidable unit in the country as it put in eight goals after halftime against the Tar Heels.

The big question going forward is whether Rehfuss can continue to be the counter against defenses that double pole the Syracuse first midfield in order to have a longpole on Nick Mariano. It always gets tougher for players when they find themselves starting to be listed higher up on the opposing defense’s scouting report, and there is more film on them to study. There have been games in which it looked like they had found a player who could be consistently effective dodging against short sticks in previous games, such as when Matt Lane had three goals and two assists against Virginia.

The Syracuse offense is talented enough that they don’t need Rehfuss to be as good as his was late in the game against UNC in order to be effective, but it’s pretty clear that like most offenses, they’re much better when they have a player drawing a short stick matchup who can consistently produce for them.