Observations: Auburn 89, Syracuse 68

It's not a tournament title, but the Tigers accomplished what they set out to do in the Bahamas — wrapping it all up with their latest blueblood rout.

Auburn nearly scored 90 points Friday afternoon against Jim Boeheim’s legendary Syracuse 2-3 zone.

During the second half, there was a sequence when Auburn couldn't stop lobbing alley-oops. The Tigers were draining long-distance shots and making highlight-reel dunks to close their time in the Bahamas, and they were giving the Orange a tough time on defense the entire way.

Now consider that Auburn didn’t have most of its game plan for Syracuse — an opponent on the opposite side of the Battle 4 Atlantis bracket originally — until earlier in the day.

“We’ve got good zone offense — the challenge was, we put most of it in this morning,” Bruce Pearl said. “We had only played three games prior where we didn’t run a lot of zone offense. But to these kids’ credit, our concepts and a couple new wrinkles — look, we ran a zone set today that we haven’t practiced all year. We were getting ready for UConn, Loyola and Michigan State. We worked real hard on those three teams. The other teams in that bra…