SU vs. Carleton - 8/23/13

Carleton guard Philip Scrubb (23) works against Syracuse guard Ron Patterson (before the haircut) last year in Canadian Tire Centre on Friday, August 23, 2013.

(Stephen D. Cannerelli | scannerelli@syracuse.com)

Syracuse, N.Y. — A day before his scheduled appearance at an NCAA hearing in Chicago, Jim Boeheim rated his Syracuse basketball team's exhibition game Sunday in the Carrier Dome as the most pressing concern of his week.

"I'm more worried about Carleton," he said Wednesday at ACC Media Day, "than I am about anything else that's coming up this week."

Boeheim, known to wander into hyperbole, might not have been entirely truthful with that assessment. But the SU coach still made a salient point: The Carleton Ravens are good. Good enough to take Syracuse into overtime during the Summer of 2013. Good enough to beat Division I teams last summer. Good enough to merit a long, detailed story in Grantland.



"On Sunday, we're playing a team that should have beat us last year and we had a pretty good team last year," Boeheim said. "We're playing an exhibition game against someone that's better than us, I think. That should be a good benchmark for what we need to do."

"They're a good team," SU center Rakeem Christmas said. "Just because they're not a big DI school, you can't take them for granted."

Time Warner will televise Sunday's 1 p.m. game. Let us lay out the reasons Carleton should scare you:

The Scrubb brothers: Philip, the 6-foot-3 point guard, is the younger Scrubb. He's the most dangerous of the brothers from Richmond, BC. He scored a total of 65 points in Carleton's two wins over Memphis last summer. He shot a combined 10-of-19 from the 3-point line, a place he can be devastatingly accurate.

Carleton's Thomas Scrubb (11) gets past Syracuse's Tyler Ennis in an August 2013 exhibition game near Ottawa.

Thomas, the 6-6 wing, scored 34 in Carleton's loss to Indiana last summer. He got to the free throw line 12 times in that game.

The Scrubbs did not shoot the ball well in Carleton's 69-65 OT loss to the Orange in 2013. They were a combined 8-of-29 in that game.

The 11 exhibitions: Canadian college teams, unfettered by NCAA rules, can play more exhibitions and practice more during the summer than their American counterparts.

Carleton has played 11 exhibition games since Aug. 11. The Ravens are 10-1 in those games. Indiana beat Carleton 95-85 on Aug. 11. Philip Scrubb did not play in that game.

Carleton, too, took a 10-day team trip to Italy last June to participate in the 2014 Adidas EuroCamp.

The Memphis domination: Carleton played Memphis twice last summer. And beat the Tigers both times. The score in the Ravens' second win over Memphis? 92-60.

Carleton sank a combined 27-of-58 (47 percent) from the 3-point line in the two games. In the blowout win, Carleton scored 24 points off 21 Memphis turnovers.

In case you're wondering how good Memphis is, the Tigers were picked to finish third in the American Athletic Conference. They placed two players (Shaq Goodwin and Austin Nichols) on the AAC's preseason first-team.

The new Syracuse starters: Gone are C.J. Fair, Jerami Grant and Tyler Ennis. In their places, the Orange likely will start two freshmen (Kaleb Joseph, Chris McCullough) and a sophomore (Tyler Roberson) who averaged eight minutes per game last year.

Trevor Cooney and Rakeem Christmas will anchor the 2014-15 Orange. The two combined to average 18 points per game last year. The Scrubb brothers, by comparison, averaged a combined 33 points per game last season.