The recent success of the Georgia Tech men’s basketball team is attributable to persevering through a harsh December, second-year coach Damon Stoudamire said.
“When we came back from Christmas, it was a lot of running, it was a lot of conditioning, it was a lot of fatigue. There was a lot of fatigue,” Stoudamire said Monday on his weekly radio show on 680 The Fan. “We had to fight through the mentality that had seeped into the team, and that was a mentality of excuses and different things.”
The extra efforts behind the scenes paid off immediately as Tech (13-13, 7-8 ACC) won three consecutive games starting Dec. 28. Then the bottom fell out, as the Yellow Jackets suffered through a four-game losing streak and lost five of six overall to close January. A loss at Notre Dame dropped Tech to three games under .500 and 3-7 in ACC play.
But it was that very loss in South Bend, Indiana, on Jan. 28 that has become the defining point of the season. Stoudamire said that despite the wins being hard to come by during January, he knew his team was still making strides to improve and come together. And it was after losing to the Fighting Irish, in a game Tech led for 38 minutes before an excruciating collapse at the end, that the Jackets arrived at a crossroads.
In recent weeks Stoudamire and his players often have hearkened back to that defeat as being a come-together moment for the squad. Tech has been 4-1 since that game and has climbed into eighth place in the ACC standings with five games to play.
The Jackets are one game back of seventh-place Stanford and 1½ games behind sixth-place North Carolina.
“They haven’t had any excuses. I don’t wanna sit up here and say I haven’t allowed them to have excuses, but they’ve kind of bought in to what I’m saying and what I’m preaching,” Stoudamire added. “We’re starting to get payback. I felt like we were good enough to win with six or seven players before. Now, we just weren’t playing smart down the stretch, we were doing things that, just, to me wasn’t smart.
“We’ve become a smarter team on both sides of the ball. But the biggest thing is we’ve become a connected team. I think the (lack of) numbers have allowed guys to find a rhythm.”
Tech’s turnaround has become all that more remarkable given that freshman guard Jaeden Mustaf missed nearly a month with a foot injury. Point guard Javian McCollum has missed the past three games after a vicious hit to the head at Clemson on Feb. 4, and there is no timetable for his return. Forward Luke O’Brien hasn’t played since Dec. 18, and guard Kowacie Reeves hasn’t seen the floor since Nov. 27 — both trying to recover from foot injuries. Freshman forward Doryan Onwuchekwu hasn’t been with the team since mid-December because of what Stoudamire has termed as personal reasons.
The shortage of a deep rotation, however, has forced Tech’s available players to perform without a safety net. Sophomore forward Ibrahim Souare has emerged as a rim protector and rebounding specialist. Freshman guard Darrion Sutton has been thrown into the fire and lauded for his defensive length and positioning.
Sophomore Baye Ndongo has returned to form as a double-double machine and is playing at an all-conference level. Junior guard Duncan Powell is Tech’s utility man on both ends of the floor — a “mismatch problem” for opponents, Stoudamire likes to say. And there may be no one in the ACC this month playing as well as sophomore point guard Nait George.
“It’s rolling up your sleeves, which they did,” Stoudamire said of his team’s rise despite the rash of injuries. “Being coachable, which they were. It allowed us to keep building and keep building.
“Credit to the fellas for what they’ve endured and what they’ve overcome.”
The Jackets now have an entire week to rest before heading to Boston College (10-15, 2-12 ACC) this weekend. That Saturday matchup is the first of three road tests over the final five games, but also the first for Tech against the three worst teams in the league — Tech also hosts North Carolina State (10-15, 3-11 ACC) on March 1 and Miami (6-19, 2-12 ACC) on March 4.
Tech likely would need to win out to have any shot of finishing inside the top four of the ACC standings to get a free pass into the ACC tournament’s quarterfinals. But it is in prime position to land inside the top nine to earn a bye into the second round of the postseason, which begins March 11 in Charlotte, North Carolina, at the Spectrum Center.
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