After spending a month with USA Basketball overseas, Jim Boeheim is two weeks away from starting practice with his Syracuse basketball program.

It’s hard to believe, he said.

“I’m glad to be back. Our players have worked hard individually at this point to get themselves ready,” Boeheim said at a press conference at the Carmelo K. Anthony Basketball Center on Wednesday afternoon. “We lost four great players, our three best players probably, and one of the best backup centers we’ve ever had here from last year’s team.

“There’s a lot of work to be done.”

In between discussions during the press conference about his USA Basketball experience and the negative Yahoo! Sports article published on Monday, Boeheim spoke about junior center DaJuan Coleman’s recovery process and the other challenges the Orange could face in the upcoming season.

Coleman is rehabbing from surgery on his left knee after suffering a season-ending bone bruise last year. He also missed eight games his freshman year with an MCL injury to the same knee.

“Obviously we know his surgery was more difficult than any surgery that we’ve had, without getting into any things I can’t talk about,” Boeheim said. “We’ve said from the beginning that he was going to take a long rehab. He’s done all that.

“We hope that in October, he’ll be active. He’ll be doing stuff, we don’t know what until we get there. Even when he does stuff, we don’t know how much he will be able to do and how long he’ll be able to do it.”

Boeheim said SU won’t have a “definitive positive answer” on Coleman’s status for the year until December.

In his absence, Rakeem Christmas will maintain his spot in the middle of the 2-3 zone. Boeheim said it’ll be good to have someone with his experience playing the middle — a far cry from the comments Boeheim has made in the past about Christmas’ game.

Baye Moussa Keita and C.J. Fair have graduated and Tyler Ennis and Jerami Grant are gone as well.

Freshmen Kaleb Joseph and Chris McCullough, Boeheim said, have to get “up to speed” and both the sophomores and juniors will take on bigger, more responsible roles.

Just like last year — after the departures of Brandon Triche, Michael Carter-Williams and James Southerland — it’ll be a new-look Syracuse team to start the 2014-15 season.

“It’s a very similar situation,” Boeheim said. “… It’s something that nobody knows the answer to. Last year we never expected to win 25 straight games. Never in our wildest imaginations would we have thought that was going to happen.

“We like our players. We think we have the talented players but when you lose your three best players two years in a row, that’s a lot of guys to lose. So there’s a lot of questions to be figured out this year.”

Published on September 17, 2014 at 6:02 pm

Contact Phil: pmdabbra@syr.edu | @PhilDAbb