UGA basketball: Things getting tougher for Dogs

Athens — Already on a six-game losing streak, already 0-4 in the SEC, Georgia’s men’s basketball team now heads into the most difficult part of its schedule.

Tonight’s game at Florida starts a stretch in which four of five games are on the road, where the Bulldogs have a 9-47 record — a .161 winning percentage — in regular-season play under embattled coach Dennis Felton.

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AP

UGA coach Dennis Felton’s team is mired in a six-game losing streak and getting ready to enter the toughest stretch in its schedule.

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At Florida, Georgia will face a team that is 17-3 overall, 11-0 at home, 4-1 in the SEC and coming off a 25-point win at Vanderbilt. Then the road will take the Bulldogs to Alabama (Saturday), South Carolina (Feb. 7) and Tennessee (Feb. 11), a stretch interrupted by only one home game (Feb. 4 against LSU).

Is this an impending avalanche for a Georgia season already spiraling downward?

“It’s a test to see what kind of team we are,” freshman forward Trey Thompkins said. “It’s a test to see how we’re going to respond — whether we’re going to lay down or whether we’re going to man up and play as a team and grind one out and keep on going with it.”

To navigate this stretch, the Bulldogs (9-10 overall) surely could use whatever it was that they summoned last March, when they entered the SEC tournament with 11 losses in their past 13 games but won four games in a row to take the tornado-struck tourney.

“We have some holdover players that went through that experience last year, and they know we are capable … of turning that corner,” Felton said this week. The way to do it, he said, is to “not be blinded” by the losing streak and to focus on improvements that can make the difference in games.

This is a different team than last year’s, with the SEC tournament MVP (point guard Sundiata Gaines) having graduated and two freshmen having assumed key roles (Thompkins and point guard Dustin Ware).

Still, amid the six-game losing streak, is there something to take from last year’s turnaround?

“You definitely can take the fact that we played great defense during the tournament and just played so well together,” senior guard Corey Butler said. “But we lost a great point guard. Zac [Swansey], he’s still learning; Dustin [Ware], he’s still learning.

“We’re still fighting to get back in the groove and get back into the flow. You’re going to do it differently than the way we did it last year, because we have new guys. But we will get there.”

The most recent loss — last Saturday’s to Mississippi State in Athens — might have offered a glimmer of hope: Guided by the freshman Ware, the Bulldogs showed life in the second half, picking up the pace and getting within three points after trailing by as many as 19 in the first half.

“I definitely think [that half] will help give us some confidence going into these tough road games,” Ware said.

It also would help if Thompkins breaks out of a shooting slump. He’s 7-for-32 from the field (2-for-12 on 3-pointers) in the past three games. Meanwhile, Georgia’s other top scorer, senior Terrance Woodbury, continues to battle two painful ankles that kept him out of practice early this week.