For validation of the havoc that injuries can wreak on a team’s season, the Georgia men’s basketball team needs to look no farther than the adjoining gym inside the Stegeman Training Facility.
Coach Andy Landers’ Lady Bulldogs, who practice next door, have seen their season come completely off the rails with the key players sidelined for the season or for significant stretches. They recently lost their seventh consecutive game since leading scorer Shacobia Barbee went out with a broken leg, and the games have gotten uglier with each passing week as others have endured maladies.
That’s what makes what Mark Fox’s Bulldogs have done all the more remarkable. Georgia has dealt with illness or injury every week since the team convened for preseason practice. Yet their preseason goal of earning an NCAA tournament berth remains intact heading into the final two weeks of the regular season.
“I do think that injuries are part of the game, they really are,” Fox said before Tuesday’s practice. “So to play through injuries is part of it. But we have had more than normal.”
That’s for sure.
Since SEC play began, the Bulldogs have had three players — Yante Maten, Marcus Thornton and J.J. Frazier — suffer concussions in different weeks and miss games and practices as a result. That came after they lost their top small forwards — Juwan Parker (Achilles) and Kenny Paul Geno (wrist) — for multiple weeks because of injuries. Kenny Gaines missed almost all of preseason camp and was severely limited in the first few games of the season because of a bout with mononucleosis.
“Along with it we’ve had the cold-and-flu-type things that we haven’t talked about that every team has,” said Fox, who coached through a pretty nasty illness himself.
“I do think in the grand scheme of things it should be looked at. The fact that we’re still in position to accomplish something having endured all that, I think it probably would have folded a lot of teams.”
As it is, outside of an SEC regular-season title the Bulldogs (17-9, 8-6 SEC) still have everything still to play for. Georgia could help its cause to that end considerably with a road win Wednesday against the surging Ole Miss Rebels (19-8, 10-4).
The Bulldogs defeated the Rebels 69-64 on Jan. 20 in Athens, or shortly after they lost Parker and Geno to injury. But the Rebels have been rolling of late. They have won eight of their past nine games, the lone defeat a one-point loss at home to Arkansas.
Meanwhile, Georgia is slowly piecing itself together.
Geno came back last week and is playing a limited role in a soft cast after a six-week absence.
Parker, a starter, is tantalizing close to a return. He’ll have to have surgery after the season, but he has resumed shooting and running defensive drills in practice and plans to be on the court for the Bulldogs’ stretch run.
Frazier is having to wear a plastic mask to protect the orbital fractures in his face and is playing with a hairline fracture in his left (shooting) hand. But he’s still dealing with the residual effects of a concussion, as did Maten and Thornton before him.
“(Frazier) obviously wasn’t himself,” Fox said of the point guard’s performance against Alabama. “It took Yante probably 10 days/two weeks, Marcus 10 days/two weeks. J.J. we’ve got to hurry up. We don’t have 10 days or two weeks.”
Etc.: The Bulldogs are having to deal with weather issues in traveling to Ole Miss. The local airport is closed until Thursday because of snow in Oxford, so Georgia's charter is having to fly into Memphis, Tenn., and the Bulldogs will travel by bus from there.
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