Georgia Tech Recap

Georgia Tech 66, Clemson 64

Devastatingly close loss. Really had an opportunity to add a win to ledger that wasn't expected. There's another way to look at this loss though: we went toe-to-toe with one of the better teams in the league on the road; a team that poses not insignificant matchup problems for us on offense. Without Demontez Stitt at 100% (although, to be fair, it looked like he was playing around 90-95% most of the time). Let's take a quick look at the chart:

NCAA Basketball

I can't find win probability charts, but this is pretty close. I assume they are using Bill James' formula to calculate safe leads, but I might be wrong.)

Ouch. Had the 64-62 lead with 1:25 to go. I thought we had a good game plan coming in. For the most part, we kept GT off-balance by mixing up the pressure and on offense we opened them up and got reasonably good looks by having Stitt drive the lane (Young added a couple of nice drives as well) and being able to feed the ball into the Booker brothers (Devin looked great in limited action, banging around inside against the tall GT defense and drawing fouls). We also were drawing fouls left and right inside, putting their big men into foul trouble which helped opened up the inside a little more. I realize we only put 64 points on the board, but that was with a handful of shots that should have fallen and even worse performance at the FT line than usual.

My only complaint would be the offensive plays in the last 3 possessions or so, starting with the wild drive by Tanner Smith (3-11 from the field, that's the disappearing Smith we all know from last ACC season!). I actually quite liked Stitt's decision to penetrate with the lane wide open on the last real possession; he just picked a bad time for another of his inexplicable turnovers (which, admittedly, seem to have occurred less frequently in the past few games). My only real complaint is that we didn't at least try to get the ball inside to Booker in one of the final possessions. He'd been having a lot of success drawing fouls and it felt like we had the GT big men on their heels.

Lastly, can't talk about this game without mentioning the ridiculous call at the end. I don't care if Booker made any kind of contact on Peacock's "drive", you don't call that with 3.2 seconds remaining in a game. As an official, you don't risk making a touch foul call that gift-wraps the game for one team after an evenly played first forty minutes. Officiating in basketball is not, nor should be, context-independent. Let them decide the game in an overtime period, which, incidentally, I think would have likely favored the Tigers because of GT's foul situation.

All in all, I come away from this game feeling oddly optimistic we can end up at 10-6 in the conference instead of 9-7. We played a tall team with well-above average defense on the road to a draw. Trevor Booker held his own and didn't disappear, as was common against teams with a tall inside presence last year. We were able to feed the post on occasion. We managed relatively open looks from behind the arc, and shot the ball pretty well. It gives me hope that we have more than a fighting chance in the FSU and WF games later in the season.