ATHENS. Ga. — Having felled King Kong Kentucky with relative ease Saturday, Georgia basketball coach Mark Fox echoed what many have been saying about his unsung Bulldogs since early autumn.
“We are an older team,” Fox said at the close of the 77-70 triumph, Georgia’s ninth straight and 12th in 14 contests this season. “We should be able to finish this type of game if we play the game right.”
If they play the game the way they did against the No. 10 Wildcats, the Bulldogs just might win the Southeastern Conference.
Georgia shot better from the floor (45 percent to 38), far better from the foul line (88 percent to 63), outrebounded UK by 41-37 and handed out three more assists (12 to 9).
“Georgia made us play the way we played,” Wildcats boss John Calipari said. “They just wanted this game more than we did.”
They may also have learned how to win these kinds of games more than the Kiddie Kats, whose top three scorers are freshmen. By contrast, the Bulldogs start four juniors and a senior.
“Last year we didn’t quite have what it took to win this type of game,” said junior forward Trey Thompkins, who led UGA with 25 points and made 11 of 12 free throws. “Now we’ve been through those types of wars.”
A year ago, in Fox’s first year on the job, the Bulldogs were 5-8 in games in which the margin was no more than two possessions inside the final minute. Georgia is a robust 8-2 in such contests this season.
A second example: Down 11 at halftime Saturday, UK took its only lead (56-55) with 10:05 to play. Over the next nine minutes Georgia outscored the Cats 18-6 to lock up the victory.
“[The SEC] is hard,” Calipari said. “When we tied up the game [at 55], that’s when you find out what team you’ve got, and we need to get better. We have to be tougher, not just physically but mentally.”
UK got away with such youth and immaturity a year ago because it was such outrageously talented youth that four Big Blue freshmen were selected in the first round of the NBA draft.
But two Georgia players who might have gone that high — Thompkins and Travis Leslie — elected to stay in college, at least in part because, in Leslie’s words, “We wanted to be a part of something special here.”
And from the beginning this was a special afternoon. Stegeman Coliseum was packed long before tipoff, and for a change it wasn’t noticeably tinged with UK blue.
“We’ve had students talking about this one on the social networks for weeks,” said Bulldogs guard Gerald Robinson, the junior transfer from Tennessee State who scored 17 points. “We take them one game at a time, but this one was a little bit special.”
Added Thompkins: “Everybody in this league has [Kentucky] on their radar. We’ve been wanting this one.”
But wanting and receiving are two different things. Tennessee no doubt wanted to deliver interim coach Tony Jones a road victory at Arkansas on Saturday but failed. Vanderbilt no doubt wanted to steal a win at South Carolina but was denied. Auburn surely wanted to beat visiting LSU but hit just 2 of 25 shots in the opening half.
Winning is most often a matter of execution, sometimes to the extreme. Which is one way to explain how Georgia — making just 62 percent of its free throws for the season — hit 30 of 34 against UK.
“We’ve been hitting them a lot better in practice lately,” Robinson said. “So we were due for a game like this.”
Asked if the Dogs were hitting 88 percent of them in practice, Robinson’s eyes grew wide and a big grin crossed his face. “We hit 88 percent today? Uh, no, we’ve never hit them like that in practice.”
But enough practice apparently made for an almost perfect effort against Kentucky, so much so that the Bulldogs are on a nine-game winning streak for the first time since the Final Four season of 1983.
“I’m not about to say anything about that,” Thompkins said with a laugh.
But he did say this, words that the rest of the SEC would do well to heed: “We feel like we can play with anybody when we play our game.”
Sometimes older and wiser is better.
Contact Mark Wiedmer at mwiedmer@timesfreepress.com or 423-757-6273.