Georgia Tech coach Damon Stoudamire couldn’t get past the notion Wednesday that his team didn’t compete at the level it is capable of competing at after a loss at Florida State. The first-year leader of the Yellow Jackets sung that refrain often during his postgame comments in Tallahassee.
On Thursday and Friday, however, lamenting how Wednesday’s defeat played out no longer was part of the conversation.
“As we move forward, I’m a little different, I have an NBA mentality,” Stoudamire said. “At midnight (Wednesday) this is over with and you just kind of get ready for the next game. You don’t allow it to bleed into it because we have a totally different team we’re playing that plays a completely different style then what we’ve seen (Wednesday). You just kinda turn the page and you just move on.”
The Jackets (8-5, 1-1 ACC), who had won six of eight before losing 82-71 to the Seminoles, will be looking to get back on track at 4 p.m. Saturday when they welcome Boston College (9-4, 0-2) to McCamish Pavilion. Tech also will be striving for a much better start on offense coming off a first half at FSU that saw it shoot 26.7% from the floor and make just one of the 14 3-point shots it threw up.
Tech responded nicely in the second half by draining 17 of 29 shots. But they missed 12 free throws (10 over the final 20 minutes) and allowed Florida State virtually to score at will.
The defeat also dropped Tech’s NCAA NET ranking about 13 spots, and the Jackets are now 3-4 against teams considered Quadrant 1 and/or Quadrant 2. Boston College is considered a Quadrant 3 opponent for the Jackets, and Notre Dame, which comes to town Tuesday, is in Quadrant 4.
“I don’t wanna overwhelm my team – I think about it a lot though,” Stoudamire said about leading his team to an NCAA tournament berth. “I just feel like if we take it one practice, one game at a time, and let the cards play out, I think we’re fully capable. I really do. I shoot for the stars, I always have. But I also understand this, too, I’m not running up and down this court. So I don’t wanna have my team cash checks that they might not can’t cash yet.
“So let me just keep gassing ‘em, let me just keep bleeding into ‘em, let us just keep getting confident, and if we’re playing basketball at the right time they way we’re supposed to be playing it and going in the right direction, I think we’ll be right there at the end for some type of postseason berth.”
Boston College comes to Atlanta winless in league play, with losses to North Carolina State (Dec. 2) and Wake Forest (Tuesday). The Eagles went 9-2 outside of ACC action and are 2-0 in true road games.
For the Eagles, Quinten Post has been the straw that stirs the drink. A 7-foot, 235-pound center originally from Amsterdam and a Mississippi State transfer, Post is scoring 18.4 points per game and collecting 8.1 rebounds per contest. Post also has blocked 28 shots in 13 games.
Guards Claudell Harris (14.7 ppg) and Jaeden Zackery (12.7 ppg) also are scoring in double figures, while Zackery averages 4.4 assists per game. Stoudamire said Ebenezer Dowuona will start Saturday in an effort to try to neutralize Post.
“I lived in Boston for two years, so I’ve seen (Post) play a little bit. He’s gotten better every year,” Stoudamire said. “We gotta have multiple bodies on him; we’ve got to give him different looks. I would say he shoots it better than the other bigs we’ve played against. So he poses a challenge, but yes, we gotta touch him, we gotta feel him, we gotta make life hard for him (Saturday) afternoon.”
The Eagles, as a whole, have struggled on defense in allowing the opponent to shoot 43.1% from the floor and 35.7% on 3-point shots. They do a solid job, however, at protecting the ball, at just 9.8 turnovers per game.
Tech is 19-12 all-time against Boston College and 8-2 in home games in the series. The Jackets have won five consecutive against the Eagles, having last lost March 6, 2018.
Saturday’s game will be only the seventh home contest for Tech this season and first since Dec. 9, a welcome respite for a team fresh off two losses and two consecutive tough workouts.
“The last two days have been hard. Coming off a loss, of course, practice is gonna be hard the next two days. We’ve just been trying to build and look forward to Boston College,” Tech leading scorer Miles Kelly said. “We’re gonna approach every game like we’re gonna win. This is a must-win game just like the rest of the games are. It’s no different from any other game; we just gotta come in with the same approach and come out better in the first half.”
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