Georgia State vs. the ACC
Team/Record/Record while in ACC/Last Meeting
Clemson /0-4/0-4/2006-07
Duke/0-1/0-1/2012-13
Florida State/0-6/0-3/2009-10
Georgia Tech/2-17/0-12/2008-09
Maryland/0-2/0-2/2000-01
Miami/ 0-3/0-0/1998-99
North Carolina/ 0-1/0-1/1982-83
N.C. State/0-1/0-1/2009-10
Georgia State’s road to recovery wasn’t going to be easy after Sunday’s overtime loss to Louisiana-Lafayette in the finals of the Sun Belt tournament.
But the NIT just made that road a little harder. The Panthers must now regroup in time to figure out how to crack the defensive stalwart that is Clemson in the first round of the NIT. The Panthers (25-8) will take on the ACC’s Tigers at 9 p.m. Tuesday at Clemson. That’s not all. Georgia State must overcome its history of never having beaten an ACC team as well as try to get its best shooter back on track.
All in all, coach Ron Hunter has a lot to solve in a very short time.
“I’ve got to get them emotionally and physically ready,” he said. “That was a physically taxing game (in the Sun Belt final) and an even more emotionally draining loss.”
He said the locker room afterwards was the most down that he’d ever seen. It was obvious in the postgame press conference that red-eyed Manny Atkins and R.J. Hunter had been crying and then Hunter began crying again on the dais.
After the hour-long flight home that he said felt like four hours, Ron Hunter spoke with the team back to the gym Sunday night and said his players began to smile again.
Usually upbeat, it didn’t take Hunter long on Monday to begin putting a positive spin on what’s next.
He pointed out that Georgia State is 101 years old and this will be just the fifth postseason tournament in which the program has participated. A few of the players on the team competed in the fourth, the collegeinsider.com tournament two years ago. So while it hurts to lose, Hunter told them to be proud of what they accomplished.
“I don’t think it will be hard to get them focused once we get on the bus, once we get on the floor,” he said.
Getting ready is one thing. Playing ready is another, especially against Clemson (20-12).
The Tigers, who finished sixth in the ACC, have the NCAA’s fourth-toughest scoring defense, giving up an average of 58 points.
The defense is effective for several reasons. The Tigers don’t push the tempo on offense, which shortens games and reduces the time they spend on defense. They rely on an aggressive man-to-man scheme, led by ACC defensive player of the year K.J. McDaniels, who was fifth in the league in points (17) and first in blocks (2.74) per game. He also leads the Tigers in rebounding (seven per game).
Conversely, Georgia State is at its best when pushing the tempo offensively. A primary reason the Panthers were upset by Louisiana-Lafayette is they slowed the pace toward the end of the game, trying to draw fouls in hopes of winning the game at the free-throw line. It’s a formula they used to great success this year.
However, they shot just two free throws and one field goal in the final four minutes of regulation. A 10-point lead they held with 4:39 remaining slowly eroded until the Cajuns sent the game into overtime on a basket with 1.5 seconds left.
Hunter said he has replayed the final minutes over “200 times” but he’s not sure he would do anything different. He said he might have called timeout to give the players a chance to rest, but he said he thought Louisiana-Lafayette would change its defense if he did.
“Every decision we would have made the same,” he said.
Hunter said they will need to spread the floor Tuesday night so that Clemson has to extend its defense. They will also need to convert 3-pointers. Having R.J. Hunter, Ron Hunter’s son and the team’s leading scorer, hitting shots will help.
Hunter scored 16 points in Georgia State’s 72-45 semifinal victory over Arkansas State and 14 more in the championship loss. But it took him 21 shots to reach those 30 points. An accurate 3-point shooter, he attempted at least three shots from well beyond the NBA’s 3-point range, none of which went in. Those attempts contributed — along with him being the focus of defenses — to his missing 10 of his 15 3-point attempts in the tournament, a 33-percent success rate well below his regular-season average (40.2 percent).
“He’s being defended so well that when he gets that free look, he is rushing his shot,” Ron Hunter said. “He needs to make some adjustments and get to the line more than he has.”
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