ATHENS — The Georgia men’s basketball team will open practice Friday without the players responsible for 61 percent of last season’s points and 67 percent of last season’s rebounds, not to mention an incalculable percentage of the credit for the Bulldogs reaching the NCAA tournament.
“We are in a lot of ways starting anew,” coach Mark Fox said.
This will be the Bulldogs’ third season under Fox, the first in which he cannot build around the talents of Trey Thompkins and Travis Leslie — the team’s top two scorers and rebounders in each of the past two seasons. Thompkins and Leslie skipped their senior seasons to enter the NBA draft, where both were chosen in the second round by the Los Angeles Clippers.
Georgia also lost a third starter, forward-center Jeremy Price, and a key backup, forward Chris Barnes, from last season’s team. Both completed their eligibility and graduated in May.
The departures leave Fox with two players who were part of the program when he was hired in April 2009 — guards Dustin Ware, back for his fourth season as a starter, and Matt Bucklin, a reserve and former walk-on.
In the season before Fox’s arrival, Georgia went 12-20 (3-13 SEC) with three freshmen — Thompkins, Leslie and Ware — who later would accelerate the new coach’s rebuilding process. Last season, the Bulldogs went 21-12 (9-7), losing to Washington in the first round of the NCAA tournament. Now, Fox faces another rebuilding task, although the first day of practice clearly is not the time for tempering expectations.
“Our expectations always are pretty high within our team,” Fox said. “I refuse to let these guys think they cannot be successful. ... I think if they play the right way and learn the right lessons, they can be very successful. So we’ll go into the season with optimistic thoughts for sure.”
Said Ware: “We feel if we get better every day, by the time March comes around hopefully we’ll be in a good position. ... Obviously we lost a lot, but we gain a lot in some good freshmen. We’re excited to get the year started and get out there competing.”
The roster includes four freshmen, including the heavily recruited Kentavious Caldwell-Pope, who is expected to help replace the scoring lost from last season’s team; sophomore forwards Marcus Thornton and Donte’ Williams, both of whom figure to have major roles after playing sparingly last season; and junior-college transfer center John Florveus, one of five members of this year’s signing class.
“We’re very green. We’re as green as the New York Jets,” Fox said. “We’ve got inexperience all over the place.”
The Bulldogs do have experience in one important place, the backcourt, where Ware and Gerald Robinson Jr. provide the promise of stability. Robinson, a Tennessee State transfer who started for Georgia last season, is the leading returning scorer, having averaged 12.2 points per game. Ware averaged 8.1 points last season and believes his game will benefit from his loss of 13 pounds in the off-season.
“It’s real nice to have them to help me,” Caldwell-Pope said of Ware and Robinson. “They’re like two big brothers for me.”
From what he has seen, Ware said Caldwell-Pope “is just as good as, if not better than, advertised. ... He’s going to be big for us.”
Fox envisions a team that will play more of an up-tempo style. Whether it can sustain the program’s positive momentum is the overarching question.
“We wanted to become relevant again,” Fox said, and he thinks the program accomplished that by reaching the NCAA tournament, having two players drafted and signing a McDonald’s All-American (Caldwell-Pope).
“All of those things are part of the rebuilding process,” Fox said. “We have a ways to go, but it was important for us to have that success so we can build on it.”
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