The Syracuse Orange men’s basketball team had plenty of guys step up in a close but eventual loss on Monday night to the Indiana Hoosiers. One name who didn’t have the best night, however, was Gavin Doty.
And Doty will admit it straight up.
“I’m hard on myself. I got to be a lot better. I wasn’t myself tonight. I’ll take all the blame for this loss,” Doty said after the game. “This hurts. It sucks.”
Doty finished with just five points on 2/7 shooting overall and 0/3 from three in 28 minutes of action
against the Hoosiers. He also had seven rebounds, two assists, and two turnovers.
Doty had reached double-digit scoring in both of the Orange’s first two games of the 2026-27 season. Monday’s performance was his first in which he didn’t score at least 10 points since December 7 of the prior year.
The Siena transfer scorer is no stranger to Indiana or Power Five competition.
He, then-Siena head coach Gerry McNamara, and the rest of the Saints faced the Hoosiers in 2025-26. Doty had 16 points in the blowout loss to Indiana. Doty’s “claim to fame,” by many outside the Syracuse bubble, came as recently as this past spring, when he played all 40 minutes, scored 21 points, and nearly got 16-seeded Siena to the finish line in what would’ve been a monumental upset over No. 1 Duke. Siena lost by six to the Blue Devils in the First Round.
“The margin for error is so small. This one hurts bad. I think we’re the better team. At the end of the day, you got to win the basketball game. We didn’t tonight. So it hurts,” Doty said. “But we got some fire under us. We know what we can do, and (what) we’re capable of this year.”
But against the Hoosiers this time around, Doty couldn’t get much going.
He was held without a field goal in the first half. In the second half, he did have two timely baskets.
One was a mid-range shot to stop an early Hoosiers run coming out of the locker room. The other was a put-back layup off an offensive rebound to tie the game at 74 with 95 seconds left.
Doty said individually, he has to be more aggressive from the jump, but also be better “at every level.”
“There are a lot of plays in my head right now that I wish I could get back, but you can’t do that. I’m just going to focus on the next game and put this one past me,” Doty said.
Talking about how his team played, Doty said the Orange’s biggest sore spots against Indiana were a) the turnovers and b) not enough discipline defensively, particularly guarding the Hoosiers at the three-point line. There were at least three times in which a Syracuse defender fouled an Indiana player who was attempting a three. Indiana made seven of the nine freebies it got on those fouls.
And one of those instances happened when the game was tied 74-74. Those free throws ended up giving the Hoosiers the lead for good in the waning seconds of the game.
Doty and Syracuse will look to take the lessons it learned from their first Power Five opponent and bounce back against arguably the toughest opponent left on the team’s non-conference schedule: No. 13 St. John’s.
“We know what we got to be better at,” Doty said. “Obviously, you see our talent and what we are capable of this year. We’re going into every game like we’re going to win the game.”
