Things to know before Georgia Tech's non-conference game against Tusculum, which starts at 7:30 p.m. at McCamish Coliseum and will be broadcast online on ACC Network Extra.
1. Georgia Tech will be without guard Justin Moore again for Tuesday's game with an abdominal injury. Should Tech gain control of the game, I won't be surprised if a number of players sit, starting with guards Josh Heath and Tadric Jackson, center Ben Lammers and forward Quinton Stephens. Heath has been fighting some sort of bug, Jackson and Stephens have ankle injuries and Lammers has been maxing out his minutes. In a perfect world for coach Josh Pastner, backups like forwards Christian Matthews and Sylvester Ogbonda would get a lot of minutes to gain more experience.
2. After his extended run against Wake Forest, Ogbonda bears watching. Ogbonda played 14 minutes due to center Ben Lammers' foul trouble and backup post player Abdoulaye Gueye being out, likely for the season, with a fractured wrist. Ogbonda had played just 14 minutes in Tech's first 10 ACC games, 11 of those minute in the blowout loss to Duke. He is not someone that Tech was planning to count on much this season.
Against Wake Forest, he finished with five points and two rebounds before he fouled out. He’s limited offensively and obviously can’t use all five fouls in 14 minutes, but he was not overwhelmed by the moment and at least held his own.
“’Ves’ came in and did some nice stuff,” Pastner said. “Obviously, there’s a difference between the stuff that Ben and Ves can do in the post, but Ves came in and gave us some good minutes.”
Playing the post is not ideal for Ogbonda – the offense runs through Lammers, and so that’s a role that Ogbonda had to try to play against Wake Forest – but he’s likely the best option that Pastner has off the bench.
Gueye’s injury was a tough break for Tech’s chances. He was coming along, and looked like he could be effective in spurts. Losing him definitely hurts. Tuesday could be a useful opportunity for Ogbonda to get a lot of game experience in a presumably low-pressure environment.
3. How good is Tusculum?
This season, the Pioneers are a middle-of-the-pack team in a fairly strong Division II conference. Last year, four of the South Atlantic Conference’s 12 teams made the Division II NCAA tournament and one of them (Lincoln Memorial, as though you needed to be told) reached the national championship game.
One of Pastner’s favorite talking points of late has been that Shorter University, a Division II school in Rome, took Tech to overtime in its season-opening exhibition game. Shorter, if you’re wondering is 14-8 this year. Another point of reference – Western Washington, a ranked team in Division II, went to overtime in its exhibition game against Washington in November.
Tusculum takes a lot of 3-pointers (23.8 per game) and makes 38.1 percent of them. The Pioneers also take care of the ball well (15.9 assists per game, 52nd in Division II. Guard Cory Fagan has made a 3-pointer in 38 consecutive games, a school record.
This is probably way more than you wanted to know, isn’t it.
4. I wrote a story for myajc about how this game came together. It is kind of an oddity – Tech has not played a regular-season game against a Division II opponent since 2010, and that was the result of then-coach Paul Hewitt doing a favor for a former player, Clarence Moore, who was then the coach at Kentucky State. No other ACC team has a Division II opponent on its regular-season schedule this season. The game being scheduled has to do with, among other things, Pastner's preferences for league scheduling, money, RPI and Tech assistant coach Eric Reveno.
(This has nothing to do with Tusculum, but is kind of interesting. Moore left Kentucky State after the 2010-11 season to take a position with Edison Chouest Offshore, a shipbuilding and shipping giant in Louisiana. The company's CEO is Gary Chouest, who with his wife became Moore's legal guardian when he was in high school in a situation not unlike NFL lineman Michael Oher, chronicled in "The Blind Side." Part of Edison Chouest Offshore's fleet is the Clarence Moore, an offshore supply ship with a gross tonnage of 3,242 tons.)
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