The Georgia Tech men’s basketball team has gotten back on track this week with a pair of badly needed wins. The Yellow Jackets now face their toughest challenge of the season to date with back-to-back road trips against high-level competition.
Tech begins the week by visiting No. 21 Oklahoma. That matchup will mark the Jackets’ first time playing outside of McCamish Pavilion this season and its third time facing an opponent from a major conference (they’re 0-2 in their two previous tries against such foes).
“After these last two wins it feels good,” Tech point guard Nait George said. “Everybody’s getting in a rhythm, finding where they fit in and where they excel and I feel like we’re doing a good job there. We got some big games coming up, we get that confidence I feel like we’re gonna be good for these games.
“If we keep our turnovers low, we got shooters, we got shotmakers, so as long as we get a shot up at the rim we got a higher chance at winning.”
George was a major catalyst in Tech’s 87-68 win over Central Arkansas on Saturday. George had 16 points and 11 assists to complement Lance Terry’s 25 points. Those stat lines were needed for a Tech team missing guards Javian McCollum and Kowacie Reeves due to unspecified injuries.
The Jackets (4-3) started the week with a 91-67 victory over Charleston Southern. George and Baye Ndong both had 17 points in that win. Freshman Jaeden Mustaf scored 34 points total in the two victories.
The wins came on the heels of a 23-point defeat to Cincinnati on Nov. 23. Tech’s second-year coach Damon Stoudamire seemed to indicate that defeat led to seismic changes in the Jackets’ clubhouse.
“I’ve really been on these guys for a lot of different reasons for a lot of different things. The attention to detail, the toughness part of it, the playing with passion, playing for one another, competing every possession, like, we gonna do that,” Stoudamire said Saturday. “I don’t really care who it is, if you don’t, then you gotta come out the game. I’m just not gonna compromise myself no more moving forward. I think I maybe took the foot off the pedal a little bit, and it’s not even necessarily about this group, I might have did that last year. The real me has came out. So I’m just not compromising none of that.
“So we gonna do things and we gonna do it for excellence, not to please me. We’re doing it because great habits has to be a part of life. So guys gotta do the right thing each and every day because you create your habits and whether they good or bad it becomes a part of who you are.”
Oklahoma is off to a 7-0 start, a run that includes a 3-0 mark at the Battle 4 Atlantis in the Bahamas where the Sooners beat Providence, Arizona and Louisville. Oklahoma is one of the nation’s best teams in free-throw shooting, steals, 3-point defense, turnover margin and turnovers forced.
Senior forward Jalon Moore, who spent his first two college seasons at Tech and never averaged more than eight points per game, is OU’s primary scoring threat at 18.4 points per game. Freshman guard Jeremiah Fears (16.9 pgg) and senior guard Kobe Elvis (10.9 ppg) are also scoring in double figures and senior forward Sam Godwin is pulling in more than seven rebounds per contest.
Tech’s McCollum spent the 2023-24 season at OU where he made 30 starts, averaged 13.3 points and 3.4 assists per game.
After Tuesday, Tech will have to turn its attention to a trip to Chapel Hill, where it will go up against No. 20 North Carolina at 2 p.m. Saturday.
“I was pointing to these two (previous) games, they’re like the tuneups, the prelims. The heavyweight fights is coming up,” Stoudamire said. “We gotta get better. We’ll play a tough Oklahoma team. I look forward to playing ‘em, but, again, I don’t gotta go out on the floor. We gotta prepare almost as if we were going to an ACC tournament or something like that. We gotta put our hat on.
“To me, everything that we lost to Georgia and Cincinnati we can gain it right back by winning on Tuesday and that’s how I see it. I’m excited about the opportunity because, for me, now I’ll be able to see what we look like against another team that looks like the teams we haven’t had success against. I’m looking forward to this challenge and see how we respond to that.”
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