What Yante Maten did down the stretch for the Georgia Bulldogs Friday night, his teammates see every week in practice. And nobody was happier than those guys to see the freshman do what they know he can when it mattered the most.
Maten, a 6-foot-8 forward from Detroit, stepped up in the final five minutes of Friday night’s SEC Tournament matchup against South Carolina. Around the time senior Marcus Thornton fouled out, Maten scored six consecutive points with the game hanging in the balance from 4:58 to 2:57. Then he grabbed a big defensive rebound — his 10th of the game — in the furiously-played final minutes of the game. Along with his 13 points, Maten recorded the first double-double of his young collegiate career
Maten’s efforts contributed significantly to a 74-62 win over the Gamecocks at Bridgestone Arena. The third-seeded Bulldogs (21-10) advance to the tournament semifinals for the second year in a row. They’ll face No. 2 Arkansas (25-7) Saturday at about 3:30 p.m. ET.
“Marcus had gotten into foul trouble, so I knew I needed to come in and bring some effort and defensive energy and the rebounding that he does,” the 6-foot-8 Maten said afterward. “That was the basics of it. I knew I had to step up.”
Maten’s contributions came as senior Marcus Thornton spent much of the second half in foul trouble. The Bulldogs’ leading scorer and rebounder drew his fourth foul midway through the second half and fouled out with 3:53 to play. He had 15 points and eight rebounds at the time.
“Obviously he’s had to learn a lot, experience a lot, throughout the year,” Georgia coach Mark Fox said of Maten. “He got hit by a car (in January). But he’s grown up and certainly played very very well for us in the second half.”
Said sophomore guard J.J. Frazier: “We’re extremely proud of Yante. We’ve seen this in practice a lot. We always ‘Big Fella’ to play like that in games, and he did. He played hard and he competed hard. He gave everything he had and he carried us throughout the second half with his effort.That’s all you can ask for for a freshman. He played a huckuva game.”
Frazier played one heckuva game, as well. The diminuitive point guard made two of the biggest plays to secure victory in final two minutes. His steal of a South Carolina inbounds pass led to a fast-break lay-up and a 67-61 lead with 90 seconds to play. Then, with the shot-clock horn about to sound, he launched a 3-point shot from the 25-foot range and nailed it for an insurmountable seven-point lead with 39 seconds to go.
“I focus a little more in those situations,” Frazier said. “When the clock’s going down, you just try to make the best play possible. I just wanted to knock the shot down because I knew they were close.”
It was vintage Georgia this season because the Bulldogs were having to overcome adversity right and left. At about the same time Thornton left the game with his fourth foul, Charles Mann went out with a left-knee injury and Kenny Gaines had to go to bench after aggravating his left foot sprain. Both players ended up finishing the game and say they’ll be ready to play Saturday afternoon against Arkansas.
“Vintage Georgia, maybe, yeah,” Fox said. “But we need to change some of that because we’ve got too many games to play. We need to get healthy. We’ve got to figure out how to do that. But the one thing we have is a team.”
Charles Mann had 12 and Nemanja Djurisic 11 for the Bulldogs, who out-rebounded South Carolina 34-29.
Now they’ve got to get ready for a high-scoring Arkansas team that beat them 79-75 in the SEC opener in Athens way back on Jan. 6. The Bulldogs had led by eight in the second half of that game.
“I can barely remember it,” Fox quipped. “I remember Kenny (Paul Geno) broke his wrist. … The hardest thing about it will be the quick turnaround. You know, it’s a challenge.”
The 11th-seeded Gamecocks, playing for the third consecutive night, leave the tournament at 17-16. They beat the Bulldogs in their two regular-season meetings. Georgia played short-handed in both.
Junior guard Kenny Gaines started for the Bulldogs after missing the regular-season finale against Auburn with a sprained left foot. Juwan Parker, who is battling an Achilles injury, did not play after getting 15 minutes in Georgia’s last game.
Georgia pulled ahead by 12 points early in the second half as Thornton’s spinning runner in the lane made it 38-26 with 18:24 to play. But that would prove to be the last field goal the Bulldogs would make for more than 10 minutes.
Meanwhile, the Gamecocks started to find their range and reeled off a quick 8-0 run to tie the game at 42 at the 13:54 mark. They’d grab their first lead since 2-0 on Laimonus Chatkeicius’s short banker, 44-43, at the 11:39 mark.
South Carolina would stay ahead only for 27 seconds before Georgia wrestled away the lead again from the foul line. And when Frazier finally broke the field-goal barrier with a driving lay-up at the 7:46 mark, the Bulldogs led 52-47.
In the meantime, everything that could go wrong did. Mann went out — albeit briefly — with a left knee issue. And then Gaines followed 30 seconds later with a left-foot injury he apparently aggravated. Topping it off, Thornton drew his fourth foul. He’d finally foul out with 3:53 to play.
“Throughout the season we’ve continued to battle injuries,” Mann said. “We just have to step up and continue to stay tough and play. No matter if one or two people go down, we’re going to keep playing and we look forward to it.”
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