R.J. Hunter doesn’t make every 30-foot 3-pointer he shoots.
Georgia State doesn’t win every close game.
The coolness that the Panthers (25-9) showed in rallying from 12 points down in the final three minutes to defeat Baylor in the NCAA Tournament’s second round hasn’t always been there.
In fact, until the Panthers’ past five games — all wins in which they have remained calm under immense pressure — they have had problems closing games. Leads were blown against Colorado State, Old Dominion, Louisiana-Lafayette and Georgia Southern.
Coach Ron Hunter and his players couldn’t have picked a better time to solve the issue, with Xavier up next in the third round of the tournament.
“This morning when I saw our guys for breakfast, the confidence level of our guys right now, it’s unbelievable,” he said. “They’re enjoying this. If we win Saturday, we’re going to bus to L.A. We’re just going to take off, and this is going to be like the Brady Bunch, Partridge Family. This is fun for us.”
Winning games tends to make people happy.
Georgia State has won 87 games since Hunter was hired before the 2011 season. But this is his first time leading the team into the tournament.
They got there with a six-game winning streak, the last five of which defined the season and turned on its head a suspicion that Georgia State couldn’t win big games.
The Panthers rallied from nine points behind in the second half to defeat Louisiana-Monroe, which was trying to move into first place in the Sun Belt. They saw Ryan Harrow go down with a strained hamstring, but still knocked off co-leader Georgia Southern to clinch the team’s second consecutive regular-season title. They followed by defeating Louisiana-Lafayette in the semifinals of the Sun Belt tournament.
The Cajuns defeated the Panthers in the finals of last year’s Sun Belt tournament, rallying from 11 points down in the final six minutes to force overtime. It was that loss that sent up red flags. The Panthers won another tough game against Georgia Southern, 38-36 in the final of the Sun Belt tournament, to clinch a spot in the NCAAs.
And, of course, they defeated Baylor by overcoming a 12-point margin in the final three minutes, surviving an 11-minute stretch in which they had one field goal.
“I don’t care what team you have, at some point of the season, you peak, and once you hit the peak, there’s only one way to go, and that’s down,” Hunter said.
“Fortunately for us, we’ve started playing our best basketball about 14, 15 days ago. That’s when I thought we really started to play our best basketball, and that’s why we’re playing well now.”
The players said they learned lessons from the losses to the Rams, Monarchs and Cajuns that they have applied during this streak.
The most important may be about effort.
“A lot of time we would get up and say, ‘We’ve already won this,’” forward T.J. Shipes said. “Getting here and playing against Baylor, if you get comfortable, you’re done. I don’t know why it took so long, but we learned that every time we get comfortable we’re done.”
With improved effort, the mistakes that led to those losses, errors such as not rebounding and making turnovers, have gotten cleaned up.
The Panthers had only three turnovers in the second half against Baylor, none in the final 10 minutes. With a tenacious defense, they forced the Bears into a season-high 21 turnovers, including four in the final three minutes.
“We really just wanted to learn from our mistakes, and I know early on we were a young team, we were still learning together,” guard Ryann Green said. “And I feel like later on those lessons that — we lost early on in the year, that really taught us to win these games late in the year, and that’s what coach told us, just stick through it, and it’ll all work out at the end.”
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