As Kris Joseph delved into the key aspects of another suffocating defensive effort by Syracuse, he stopped to correct himself.

At first, the SU forward said the Orange as a team blocked shots to shut down Seton Hall’s inside game. But he quickly rephrased that statement.

‘Or, I should say just Fab (Melo) was getting blocks,’ he said with a laugh.

It was a necessary correction on a night when SU sophomore center Fab Melo set an SU single-game record with 10 rejections. His relentlessness all over the court powered No. 1 Syracuse (14-0, 1-0 Big East) to a 75-49 win over Seton Hall (11-2, 0-1) in the Orange’s Big East opener on Wednesday. Melo’s big night wasn’t relegated to just the defensive end as the sophomore also tallied a career-high 12 points. He also came up just three rebounds short of a triple-double in front of 25,089 fans at the Carrier Dome.

But it was mainly his play at the center of SU’s 2-3 zone stole the show Wednesday, coming up with two-thirds of the Orange’s 15 blocks on the night.

And Melo said the performance should serve as a statement to the rest of the Big East.

‘They just come and I keep blocking,’ he said. ‘They’re going to keep coming and I’m going to keep blocking. That’s how it’s going to be the whole season.’

Melo had just 31 blocks on the season coming into the game but got involved early on with a big rejection of Seton Hall’s Fuquan Edwin on SHU’s fourth possession of the game. After the stuff, Orange assistant coach Mike Hopkins stood up off the bench to yell some words of encouragement to the 7-foot Brazilian native. His first bucket came minutes later after Brandon Triche found him for a two-handed slam that put Syracuse up 6-1 early.

From there, Melo dominated. SU took that early lead and never relinquished it, thanks in large part to the big man down low.

His best stretch came with less than two minutes to play in the first half. On one possession, he stuffed two shots from Edwin, the first a slight deflection and the second a powerful rejection out to the 3-point line.

Melo scored Syracuse’s final bucket of the first half when Triche found him for another two-handed dunk with 10 seconds left. But he wasn’t done yet. The sophomore swatted Herb Pope’s last-second layup off the glass as the buzzer sounded.

It was his eighth block in the first 20 minutes.

‘A lot of guys wouldn’t have jumped for that,’ point guard Scoop Jardine said. ‘He was late. You normally get dunked on in that situation because he was late. But with his energy, he went and got it. We knew he messed up and he made up for it. That really was the game-changer. Even though we were up a lot, that was the game-changer.’

That game-changer kept SU’s lead at 34-15 heading into halftime. And while he swatted his way to the Syracuse single-game blocks record, he also showed some offensive prowess to start the second half.

He knocked down a turnaround jumper from the right elbow, just before recording the record-tying block with another rejection of Edwin. That block triggered a fast break for the Orange, which Melo ended by going over Pope to tip in a Triche miss.

Seton Hall called a timeout with the score ballooned to 40-20, but the stoppage wasn’t enough to slow Melo. He banked in a layup on SU’s next possession to give him a career-high 12 points.

And the final block, which gave him his first career double-double, came less than a minute later. Pope tried to power through Melo in the post, but the Syracuse sophomore held his ground and blocked the shot with his right hand to set the Orange record.

‘I think it’s his conditioning,’ head coach Jim Boeheim said. ‘He’s worked hard. I think he keeps working hard every day. And he keeps getting better.’

Melo exited the game just before the 12-minute mark with SU up 50-30 and never came back in. Jardine said he was nudging Boeheim on the bench, trying to get the coach to let the center get back in and try for the triple-double, but that never happened.

Still, Melo’s line of 12 points, 10 blocks and seven rebounds in 25 minutes showed the drastic improvement that he has made from last year. In SU’s Big East opener last year, against Notre Dame, he played just seven minutes and failed to score.

And for him, a game like this against Seton Hall is the payoff from that development.

‘It came from a lot of hard work,’ Melo said. ‘Hard work in practice every day. And now, it’s paying off.’

zjbrown@syr.edu 

Published on December 28, 2011 at 12:00 pm