ATLANTA
About the time when Wake Forest should be coming of age, the Deacons played like rookies in Saturday's 76-74 loss at Georgia Tech.
Coach Dino Gaudio mentioned time and again in October that his basketball team was one of the youngest in the ACC. But midway through the junior seasons of Chas McFarland, L.D. Williams and Ish Smith and sophomore seasons of Jeff Teague and James Johnson, the Deacons have a healthy complement of players who have weathered their share of ACC wars.
The experience was either lost or temporarily misplaced against a team that came into Saturday's game burrowed in the basement of the ACC with a 0-6 record. In blowing their 10-point, first-half lead, the sixth-ranked Deacons had the look of a young team on the road.
They responded poorly to the Yellow Jackets' physical play and committed 25 personal fouls and two technicals. Teague was assessed a technical late in the first half for complaining that Iman Shumpert pushed him to get off his shot. Smith got his barely more than a minute later when he and Shumpert were called for double technicals.
"We fought back, but in the wrong way," Smith said. "That's something we're going to work on, trying to use our emotions in the right way.
They broke down defensively, allowing the Georgia Tech to gut their interior defense so completely that Gaudio, for one of the few times this season, resorted to a zone.
"We rely on our pack defense, and we didn't have that pack in there," senior Harvey Hale said. "They got inside way too easy."
They shut down offensively and managed six points in the final eight minutes. The Deacons scored on two of their final 14 possessions.
"I think it's a credit to their defense," Gaudio said. "I think we became a little bit stagnant. I think we were trying to go a little too much one-on-one, and we weren't running our offense like we needed to on the road."
They left points at the free-throw line, the two biggest when Teague missed the front end of a one-and-one with 1:31 left, while the Deacons were clinging to a 74-72 lead. They were 10 of 17 for the game.
"It was the same thing on Wednesday night," Gaudio said, alluding to the Deacons' nine missed free throws against Duke. "We didn't make free throws. It's as simple as that.
"If we make those free throws, it might have been a different game. If we make our free throws on Wednesday night the game doesn't come down to the last possession. If we make our free throws (against Georgia Tech), the same thing."
For all their breakdowns, the Deacons still led 74-70 after Al-Farouq Aminu tapped in his own miss with two minutes remaining. Experienced, mature teams put those kinds of games away, especially against an opponent that had lost five in a row and eight of the previous 10.
Instead, it was the team that had beaten two teams ranked No. 1 that came unraveled. During their final three possessions, Teague missed the free throw, the Deacons were called for a 35-second violation when Johnson passed the ball ti Hale as the buzzer sounded, and Hale, on the climatic inbounds play of the game, threw a low-percentage pass down the sidelines that Johnson didn't catch.
Both Hale and Gaudio said later that when Georgia Tech denied the inbounds pass to Teague that Hale should have called timeout.
The late collapse gave the Yellow Jackets a shot at the victory, and Shumpert made it over Teague with a second remaining to drop Wake Forest to 17-2 overall and 4-2 in the ACC going into Wednesday's game at Miami.
Teague admitted that the Deacons got rattled when the battle reached its fever pitch.
"I think that happened because we started thinking about getting a win," Teague said. "We weren't just playing our game and doing what we usually do. People thought about the time and the score, thinking ‘We've got to get this win, we've got to get this win. We can't let them beat us.'
"They did it."
■ Dan Collins can be reached at 727-7323 or at dcollins@wsjournal.com.
Email
Facebook
Google
Twitter
Favorites
More
Advertisement