A season that has had generous servings of disappointment and frustration may have found a new low point Saturday.
With a second-half performance that was nowhere near its potential, Georgia Tech stumbled in a 63-55 home loss to Clemson in which the Yellow Jackets failed to match the Tigers’ energy or execution and lost patience with each other in the process.
“The vibe got kind of out of control, arguing a little bit,” forward Marcus Georges-Hunt said. “We didn’t keep our composure. People were getting mad at each other, stuff like that.”
Tech dropped to 13-14 overall and 4-10 in the ACC, falling below .500 for the first time since the 2011-12 season, coach Brian Gregory’s first at Tech. Clemson (17-9, 8-6) was picked to finish 14th in the ACC in the preseason, but stayed in the hunt for an NCAA berth with the win.
When Georges-Hunt scored on a 3-pointer with 18:49 to go in the second half, Tech claimed a 34-25 lead and what turned out to be its largest advantage of the game. By unofficial count, the Jackets had scored their 34 points on 29 possessions, an extremely efficient rate of 1.17 points per possession. They had turned the ball over a reasonable six times.
As has so often happened this season, the trap door flung open under the Jackets. Tech scored six points in its next 12 possessions, voiding seven of the possessions with turnovers. Passes were poorly executed, ill-advised or bobbled out of bounds. It was a remarkable demonstration. In Duke’s 68-51 win over Tech on Tuesday, the Blue Devils turned the ball over five times — in the entire game.
On one inbounds pass from the baseline, which did not result in a turnover, Gregory said, “it was as casual of a play as I’ve seen our team make all year long.”
Clemson cashed those seven turnovers in for 12 points, driving a 17-6 run that gave the Tigers their first lead since the midway point of the first half.
Tech took one more lead, 46-44 on a Trae Golden 3-pointer at the 7:24 mark, but the Jackets lost that within the next minute and a half and never led again.
“I thought they were really ready and controlled the first half,” Clemson coach Brad Brownell said of the Jackets. “Our guys just did a better job (in the second half). We didn’t make any major adjustments; we just guarded harder.”
Guard Damarcus Harrison scored 10 of his 15 points in the second half, including a pair of decisive 3-pointers. In the final 20 minutes, the Tigers played at an energy level high above Tech’s, winning loose balls and crucial offensive rebounds.
Gregory noticeably was discouraged by his team’s play. In conceding Clemson’s energy advantage, Gregory allowed that there can be logical explanations for that, such as the extended minutes players have played because of various injuries.
However, “we’re not at that ability to fight through logical and rational reasons,” he said. “Because to be successful in this league, sometimes you need to bust through those, and we just haven’t had that ability to do that on a consistent basis. Sometimes that’s more frustrating, where you show it and then 48 hours later, three days later, you don’t. It’s not just who we are yet.”
The prolonged lapse repeated a pattern that Tech has fallen into on a number of occasions. The Jackets scored one point over the final 9:52 in a loss against Virginia, three points over a 7 1/2-minute stretch in a win over Notre Dame and two points in a seven-minute stretch in a loss at Clemson.
Saturday’s game also became part of a more prolonged sequence of failure for the Jackets. It was their ninth consecutive loss to Clemson, a confounding run given that the Tigers have not been particularly successful over that stretch. Barring an unlikely meeting between the two teams at the ACC tournament, seniors Kammeon Holsey, Daniel Miller and Jason Morris will end their Tech careers without beating the Tigers.
With Golden and Robert Carter back healthy — Golden led all scorers with 17 after scoring five combined in his past three games — Gregory has as full a lineup as he’s had since the start of the ACC season. But the Jackets have only four more regular-season games, three on the road, to put the pieces together.
“We’ve got some guys that need to step up for us in these last three weeks of the season,” Gregory said.
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