The case that Clemson is a better basketball team than Georgia Tech is not one made with ironclad arguments. All except for the results of their past seven games.
For the second time in 17 days, Tech lost to the Tigers by three points in a game in which the Yellow Jackets squandered possessions, suffered from lapses on defense and missed a last-second 3-point attempt. On Thursday night, it took the form of a 56-53 loss at McCamish Pavilion.
“Missed blockouts, loose balls we should have got, some calls we should have got,” said forward Marcus Georges-Hunt, enumerating the things that would bother him about the loss. “But I’ve got to move on because we’ve got another game Saturday against Wake Forest.”
Winners of three of their past five games, the Jackets saw the game as an opportunity to continue their modest surge in the second half of the ACC schedule. The Tigers, who edged the Jackets 63-60 at Littlejohn Coliseum on Jan. 29 and had lost three games since, seemed an ideal mark.
However, Clemson (13-11 overall, 5-7 ACC) continued its mastery of Tech (13-10, 3-8), winning its seventh in a row over the Jackets. Five days after snapping their 10-game ACC road losing streak with a superior performance at Virginia Tech, the Jackets came up short again in their attempt to win back-to-back conference games for the first time under coach Brian Gregory.
“This isn’t going to be easy,” Gregory said. “I wish it was, but where we’re at and where we want to get to, it’s going to be hard.”
The game ended in a similar manner to the earlier loss to Clemson, with Tech down three with the ball in the final seconds. At Littlejohn, it was guard Brandon Reed who missed at the buzzer. On Thursday, Clemson forward Milton Jennings gave Tech an opening when he missed his second free throw with 7.1 seconds left to keep the margin at three. Guard Mfon Udofia weaved his way up the court, but his shot just outside the arc was blocked by Jennings as time expired.
On the Jackets’ previous possession, with Tech down two at 55-53, Gregory called a play in a timeout with 25 seconds to go to try to exploit a defensive switch. The switch happened as Gregory planned, but Tech managed only a weak shot at the rim by guard Chris Bolden with nine seconds left.
After the switch, “now you’ve got to be able to exploit the mismatch, and unfortunately we weren’t able to do it,” Gregory said.
Tech controlled the boards (42-30) and shot 53.8 percent from the field in the second half. Forwards Robert Carter and Georges-Hunt contributed commendable games with 10 and 11 points, respectively. Carter also grabbed 11 rebounds. The free-throw shooting (12-for 17) was better. But Tech was done in in part by accumulating just enough mistakes – including nine shots blocked, a handful of no-excuse turnovers and failure to stay in front of Clemson guard Rod Hall – to be costly. The Jackets are 0-4 in games decided by five points or fewer.
“We’ve got to get to a point where we’re good enough to win some of those games,” Gregory said. “We’re making progress, but, again, it’s never going to happen as fast as I want or the guys want.”
The two teams engaged in staggeringly ineffective offense in the first half, finishing it with Clemson ahead 20-15, a lower total than the 48 points the two schools’ football teams scored in the first half of their game in October. Tech, which against Virginia Tech in its previous game passed 15 points at the 10:55 mark, shot 5-for-29 and had six shots rejected.
It wasn’t necessarily that either team played superlative defense — the Jackets were repeatedly taken to the basket — but shots banged off the rim as though the ball were overinflated. It should not have come as too great a surprise for the teams ranked 10th (Clemson) and 11th (Tech) in the ACC in field-goal percentage.
“I just think there are times kids just miss shots,” Clemson coach Brad Brownell said. “There are plays to be made, they just don’t make them.”
After forward Kammeon Holsey scored for Tech at the 10:19 mark to make the score 14-9 in Clemson’s favor, both teams failed to score a basket for nearly six minutes, missing 17 consecutive shots until Hall scored for Clemson on a layup.
Tech came out of halftime with a burst of energy as both teams began to connect on offense. The Jackets tied the game at 30 on a fadeaway jumper in the post by center Daniel Miller, the game’s first tie since tipoff. When Miller blocked K.J. McDaniels’ shot at the other end, Tech had a chance to take its first lead of the game, but a poor pass by Udofia turned into a steal and dunk for McDaniels. Clemson scored on its next four field-goal attempts after that, pushing the score to 41-32. The lead twice grew to 12 as Clemson repeatedly exploited the Jackets. The Tigers shot 61.9 percent from the field in the second half, highly uncharacteristic for the No. 3 team in the ACC in field-goal percentage defense.
“We couldn’t guard ’em in the post, we couldn’t guard ’em on the three, we couldn’t guard ’em on the dribble,” Gregory said.
Still, the Jackets staged a rally down 50-40 with 5:08 to go. From that point to game’s end, all of Tech’s points were scored by Carter, Georges-Hunt and Bolden.
“Coach told me to be more aggressive than I was in the first half and go rebound more,” said Georges-Hunt, who scored 10 of his 11 points in the second half, eight in the final 5:36.
Tech will have one day of preparation before playing Wake Forest in Winston-Salem, N.C., Saturday afternoon on less than 48 hours of rest. The Demon Deacons lost 82-62 to Tech at McCamish Jan. 26, but are 4-1 in ACC play at home, including a takedown of N.C. State and a narrow loss to Duke.
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