Well, that was less than ideal.
To be honest, it wasn't totally unexpected, because we just came off of two big wins and we were on the road. UGA has some talent, but they have been uneven too. However, this one was a perfect storm of UGA shooting out of their minds, and our guys getting rattled and playing poorly. Here are a few things I saw:
The good:
-17 offensive rebounds is very good, and this has been one of the consistent strengths of the team all year.
-It was nice to see Gapare back and making a positive impact. His baseline dunk was impressive and he made some good blocks.
-Ndongo has such good basketball instincts, especially defensively. He is an excellent weakside shot-blocker and got another 3 blocks and 3 steals in this one.
The bad:
-Pretty much everything and everyone else. The defense relapsed from the Duke game, the FTs relapsed (when we finally shot them--see below), the 3-point shooting was horrid, and everything looked out-of-sync.
The ugly:
-The officiating and our lack of adjustment to it. The refs were bad, and they were fine to let this game devolve into a rugby scrum, especially inside. It looked to me like our team was shocked by the refs swallowing their whistles over and over, and it took them waaaaaay too long to adjust to the way the game was being called. UGA just rolled with it and benefitted, while we kept absorbing contact on drives and expecting fouls. This led to two things: 1) Lots of altered shot attempts at the rim, and 2) No FTs. We did not shoot a free throw until there was 11:47 left in the second half. Seriously, 0 free throw attempts for GT in the first 28 minutes of game action. (Then, it was as if the refs realized it and tried to make up for it by calling lots of fouls on UGA when they were already way ahead.)
-Even with the horrible officiating, we missed approximately 586,291 lay-ups, dunks, and close shots in the game. I've seen all of these guys make layups so I will just assume that this was an outlier because 1) they were getting hacked, and 2) they were too amped up and played tight.
Let's flush this one and move on the the next. The outcome of our season is still to be decided.
Go Jackets!