With Marcus Thornton fouled out of the game Friday night, Georgia freshman Yante Maten stepped up his inside game and helped pull out a victory for the Bulldogs in the process. Georgia bested the pesky South Carolina Gamecocks 74-62 to advance to the SEC Tournament semifinals for the second straight year.
Maten scored six points in a row with the game hanging in the balance from 4:58 to 2:57. He finished with 13 points and 10 rebounds to help the third-seeded Bulldogs (21-10) schedule a date with No. 2 Arkansas (25-7) Saturday at 3:30 p.m.
What Maten couldn’t get done down the stretch, J.J. Frazier did. The diminutive freshman point guard stole an inbounds pass from South Carolina and scored on a fast-break layup with 1:30 to go. Then he rose up to hit a long, shot-clock-beating 3-pointer with 39 seconds to go for a seven-point lead. He finished with nine points.
Marcus Thornton added 15, Charles Mann had 12 and Nemanja Djurisic 11 for the Bulldogs. They out-rebounded South Carolina 34-29.
The 11th-seeded Gamecocks, playing for the third consecutive night, leave the tournament at 17-16.
Junior guard Kenny Gaines started for the Bulldogs after missing the regular-season finale against Auburn with a sprained left foot. Juwan Parker, who is battling an Achilles injury, did not play after getting 15 minutes in Georgia’s last game.
Georgia is 41-52 in tourney (.446), eighth-best record among 17 teams that have participated over the years.
Georgia pulled ahead by 12 points early in the second half as Thornton’s spinning runner in the lane made it 38-26 with 18:24 to play. But that would prove to be the last field goal the Bulldogs would make for more than 10 minutes.
Meanwhile, the Gamecocks started to find their range and reeled off a quick 8-0 run to tie the game at 42 at the 13:54 mark. They’d grab their first lead since 2-0 on Laimonus Chatkeicius’s short banker, 44-43, at the 11:39 mark.
South Carolina would stay ahead only for 27 seconds before Georgia wrestled away the lead again from the foul line. And when Frazier finally broke the field-goal barrier with a driving lay-up at the 7:46 mark, the Bulldogs led 52-47.
In the meantime, everything that could go wrong did. Mann went out — albeit briefly — with a left knee issue. And then Gaines followed 30 seconds later with a left-foot injury he apparently aggravated. Topping it off, Thornton drew his fourth foul. He’d finally foul out with 3:53 to play.
