Of Georgia Tech’s 40 minutes of basketball against South Carolina-Upstate, coach Brian Gregory thought his team played well for 11 of them.
“It takes maturity, it takes a certain amount of toughness and grit to be able to compete and play against a very good team for 40 minutes, and we’re just not there yet,” Gregory said after his team’s 59-54 loss Saturday afternoon at McCamish Pavilion. “That’s the bottom line.”
The Yellow Jackets (6-2) lost a tight game to the Spartans (8-2), who shot only 30.2 percent from the field but excelled from behind the arc and on defense.
In the 30-or-so minutes that Gregory thought his team struggled, USC-Upstate took advantage of open shots from 3-point range. The Spartans shot nearly 39 percent on 3-point shots, which accounted for 30 of the team’s 59 points. All of sophomore Josh Cuthbertson’s 12 points came from beyond the arc.
Meanwhile, Tech’s long shots couldn’t find the net. USC-Upstate forced the Jackets to attempt 21 3-point shots with what Marcus Georges-Hunt described as an extremely aggressive zone defense.
“The main objective was to get the ball in the middle,” Georges-Hunt said. “Once you get the ball in the middle, it breaks down any defense, really.”
But the Jackets couldn’t penetrate effectively and had to settle for the 14.3 percent of their 3-pointers that fell.
“This is a team that’s going to make you get into the last 10 seconds of the shot clock sometimes,” Gregory said. “You’ve got to be OK with that. If you’re a low-percentage 3-point shooter, you can’t take a quick three.”
Junior Chris Bolden, who led the team in points with 10, attempted six of the team’s 21 shots from the 3-point line. Despite making one of them, his contributions off the bench kept the Jackets from trailing in the first half. Bolden, along with Josh Heath, Tadric Jackson and Robert Sampson accounted for 18 of Tech’s 28 first-half points.
“I think our bench has been able to give us a lift,” Gregory said. “Getting a good boost offensively from them is important.”
Gregory said he relied on his bench players early in the game to keep some of the other guys fresh for the second half. With the two teams tied at 28-28 going into the locker room at halftime, the Jackets starters had put up only 10 points. Georges-Hunt, who led the team in points per game entering Saturday’s contest, with 11.4, had made a single free throw and played only nine first-half minutes.
The junior appeared fresher in the second half, getting 16 minutes of court time and finishing the game with eight points.
“Sometimes we had open shots, and we just didn’t take them,” said Georges-Hunt, who attempted one shot from the field — a missed 3-pointer — in the first half. “We didn’t take every open shot we had. It seemed like we passed up a lot of them.”
Tech’s poor shooting day coupled with 17 turnovers allowed USC-Upstate to improve upon its best start in the team’s history as a Division I program.
“This is the the kind of thing that is really a celebratory thing,” USC-Upstate coach Eddie Payne said.
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