Nait George makes return to McCamish Pavilion on Tuesday

Nait George will be back in McCamish Pavilion on Tuesday, but he won’t be suiting up for the Yellow Jackets.

Georgia Tech’s two-year starter at point guard is now a member of the Syracuse Orange. He and his new team will take the floor at 7 p.m. against George’s old team.

“I don’t hold any grudges on no kids, man,” Tech coach Damon Stoudamire said Monday. “It’s the landscape and the day and age of where we’re at.

George has started all 14 games for the Orange and is averaging 10.4 points, 5.0 assists and 3.2 rebounds per game. Shooting 41.8% from the floor, he had a season-high 22 points against Stonehill on Dec. 22 and a season-high nine assists against Monmouth on Nov. 18.

His decision to leave Tech in the offseason was a surprise, given how he had developed under Stoudamire, a coach who gave George his only shot to play big-time college basketball. George likely was going to play at Seattle University as a freshman had Stoudamire not reached out and offered a scholarship to Tech.

The 6-foot-3, 185-pound native of Toronto didn’t play for the Jackets until Nov. 22, 2023, in a road game at Cincinnati. He became a staple in the Tech lineup thereafter and finished his freshman season averaging 9.8 points and 4.7 assists per game.

George then scored 12.3 points per contest last season and totaled 221 assists (the fifth-most in a single ACC season) in becoming an honorable mention on the all-ACC team.

But in April, George announced he was transferring to Syracuse.

“I love Syracuse, the history they have,” he told ESPN at the time. “It’s a winning program. We’re going to bring them back to the NCAA tournament and go on a run there.”

Syracuse, as it turns out, isn’t all that much different ahead of its visit to Tech on Tuesday. The Orange (9-5, 0-1 ACC) have a NET ranking of 91 and are 1-5 against teams outside a Quadrant 4 ranking (they knocked off Tennessee in early December).

All nine of the Orange’s wins have been at home.

The Jackets, similarly, have the ACC’s second-worst NET at 148. Their win Saturday over Boston College, their 10th at home, did little to move the needle or strengthen the resume, but it did continue the team’s recent trend of good basketball.

Stoudamire’s team has won five of six, with the only loss being by six points on the road against a top-10 Duke squad.

“We went to Duke and we played well, but we lost, so it doesn’t do us any good to be happy with a moral victory if we don’t come back against BC, a home game, and take care of business,” Stoudamire said Saturday. “We need to understand every game for us needs to be our Duke. We don’t have the same wiggle room. We don’t have the same margin of error on a lot of things.

“So that was just my messaging. How are we gonna respond? Are we gonna keep building? It wasn’t really even about the Duke game. It’s just about we felt we got better in some things, and we gotta keep getting better.”

George isn’t the only former Jacket headed back to Atlanta on Tuesday. Forward Ibrahim Soure, who spent three seasons with the Jackets, is averaging a shade over nine minutes in 14 games and has scored a total of seven points.

“Obviously, them being one-year removed, they will have a lot of emotions,” Syracuse coach Adrian Autry said Monday. “I have done that myself in my professional career, being traded in the middle of the season and playing a former team. So I will address that and talk to them a little bit about that before we play (Tech).”