Wake Forest walked into an ambush Saturday at McCamish Pavilion.
The Demon Deacons, a little fat and happy over their upset of No. 18 N.C. State on Tuesday, had little chance against Georgia Tech, a team steeled by five consecutive losses, determined to protect its home court and lifted by a standout game from forward Robert Carter. The result was an 82-62 win for the Yellow Jackets, the most lopsided ACC win in coach Brian Gregory’s two years at Tech.
“This was a great win for us, a very positive win where we did a lot of good things,” Gregory said.
The Jackets (11-7 overall, 1-5 ACC) took their first ACC game of the season with probably their best performance of the season. Tech exploited advantages in energy and focus from the start, scoring the first 16 points of the game and forcing Wake Forest coach Jeff Bzdelik to burn two timeouts in the game’s first 122 seconds.
Tech pushed its lead to 30 less than 13 minutes into the game. The Jackets deflected passes, jumped into passing lanes, dove for loose balls and swarmed for rebounds.
“I think off the ball, we were very alert,” Gregory said.
Wake Forest (10-9, 3-4) had 12 turnovers at halftime, as many as it had committed in any of its previous five games. Bzdelik, who has seven scholarship freshmen on the roster, said his team had not practiced well after upsetting the Wolfpack in Winston-Salem, N.C.
“We were very lethargic compared to Georgia Tech, who was very desperate in their energy,” he said. “Hat’s off to them, they wanted the game much more than we did, which is a real sad testimony.”
Tech sought to avoid its first 0-6 start in ACC play since the 2008-09 season. Four of the Jackets’ five losses had been to teams with top-35 RPI rankings, according to realtimerpi.com as of Saturday – Duke (1), Miami (3), N.C. State (17) and North Carolina (35). In each, lapses in focus were punitive and costly. Wake Forest (109) was perhaps a better barometer for the Jackets (136).
“No offense to Wake Forest, but the teams that we’ve played already, they were tough,” said Carter, who scored a career-high 20 points on 9-for-10 shooting. “We played hard. We had to play hard, so we just brought the energy off those games and played even harder. We just brought it to ’em.”
Carter came into the game having made 16 of 46 attempts in his first five ACC games. Saturday, he showed off a wide arsenal of shots, hitting jump hooks in the post and knocking down two 3-pointers, including one banked off the glass. (“I didn’t call that one,” he said.) At the 11:30 mark of the second half, he roared down the lane and, in one swift and violent motion, leaped to grab a missed 3-pointer from Stacey Poole and dunked.
“Coach always says, broken-down defenses don’t rebound well,” Carter said. “We moved the ball great and nobody was there to box me out. I saw it come off the rim and exploded up and went and got it and tried to finish it.”
Guard Chris Bolden was a catalyst, as he had been in his 20-point game against Duke Jan. 17. In the game’s first 3:14, Bolden hit a 3-pointer from the corner on the opening possession, handed off to guard Mfon Udofia for another 3, assisted on a Carter basket and then dove to the floor for a steal, completing that sequence by hitting a second 3 from the corner with a hand in his face. Limited to 18 minutes by foul trouble, Bolden finished with nine points, three assists and four steals.
“You don’t have to tell Chris to look for his shot,” Gregory said. “He’s an aggressive scorer, and that’s good, because we need that.”
Bolden said a team meeting earlier in the week put the Jackets in the proper frame of mind. Udofia urged the team to be “searching for blood the whole game,” Bolden said.
Tech’s focus again temporarily lapsed, though, as its play grew sloppy in the second half. The lead shrank from 30 with 1:45 to go in the first half to 18 three minutes into the second before Tech pushed it back to as many as 27.
Said Gregory, “That’s kind of a step in the process, for guys to understand that when you have a lead, that you keep playing at the same level, as opposed to look around and kind of be maybe a little bit amazed that you’ve got as big a lead as you have and get away from what we did.”
Tech will play Tuesday at Clemson.
“We’re enjoying the win, but it doesn’t stop here,” Bolden said. “We have to keep going.”
