It's #BellaBuckets

Okay, all you Syracuse fans out there, slow down with the "Buddy Buckets" stuff.

Or at least pay the royalty fee due to TigerBlog's colleague Warren Croxton on this one.

After all, there's only one original who has the word "buckets" as part of an alliterative hashtag. As any Princeton fan knows, that would be #BellaBuckets, as in Bella Alarie, the all-time leading scorer in Princeton women's basketball history. 

As for #buddybuckets, that would be a reference to Buddy Boeheim, the son of the longtime Syracuse men's basketball coach Jim Boeheim. Buddy has been on fire of late, averaging better than 26 points per game in his last six, all of which the Cuse needed to keep extending its season.

As a result, Syracuse - the 11th seed in the Midwest - finds itself in the Sweet 16, where it will take on second-seeded Houston Saturday in the late game (9:55 tip). The winner of that game will take on the winner of the game at 2:40 Saturday between eighth-seeded Loyola (Illinois) and 12th-seeded Oregon State.

While the subject is the NCAA tournament, do you like the Friday-Monday first two rounds, or do you prefer Thursday to Sunday? The Sweet 16, by the way, starts on Saturday this year, as opposed to its usual Thursday.

Boehim (the coach) has been in charge of the Orange since 1976-77. If you're wondering, he's 5-0 all-time against Princeton, which makes TB wonder how many coaches ever have played Princeton at least five times and never lost.  

And for all of those games, none was the most excruciating loss involving Princeton and Syracuse. That would be the game in the 1991 NCAA tournament against Villanova, which was played in the Carrier Dome. It's in the very, very small group of the toughest losses for a Princeton team that TB has witnessed.

Boeheim (the player) has been on an epic run of course. His most clutch performance was against West Virginia in the second round Sunday, when he turned a 1-for-6 first half in which he scored three points into a 22-point second-half explosion, finishing with 25 on 8 for 17 shooting, 6 for 13 from three.

That's a big-time performance. And it's great that he did it while playing for his dad.

By the way, it's weird to have a tournament where a school like Syracuse can be a Cinderella. For that matter, when TB watched Gonzaga-Oklahoma, it was weird to get the sense that Oklahoma was the "little" school that was trying to take down the "giant."

Meanwhile, TigerBlog read a story by his old friend Donna Ditota - a longtime lacrosse writer and former St. Bonaventure women's basketball player - on syracuse.com that included this sentence:

Buddy Buckets, as the national TV people like to call him, keeps trending, keeps pulling along his teammates on a wild late-season ride.

That's when he said "slow down here."

As Bella Alarie began to dominate Ivy League women's basketball, TB's colleague Warren Croxton, the women's basketball contact, began to use the hashtag #BellaBuckets. It was a perfect nickname for her. 

Alarie, of course, set the record for career points at Princeton in women's basketball with 1,703 and was a three-time Ivy League Player of the Year. She became the fifth overall pick in the WNBA draft a year ago and played for the Dallas Wings in the league's bubble season. 

Before her second WNBA season begins, Alarie has been playing overseas. She had a big moment last week:

💙 @CBAvenida are back in the #EuroLeagueWomen Final Four for the 1st time since 2011🙌 pic.twitter.com/NjYb4wAyEU

— EuroLeague Women (@EuroLeagueWomen) March 19, 2021

Bella is No. 31 in the celebration.

Alarie is the lone American on the team, which is based in Spain. She had previously played in Turkey this season. The semifinals and finals for the Euroleague aren't until next month.

This summer it'll be back to the WNBA for Bella Alarie. And she can take her hashtag with her as well.

After all, and with all due respect to Buddy Boeheim's big March, she's the original.