Georgia enters NCAA Tournament vs. Gonzaga with ‘confidence and a chip on our shoulder’

Thursday’s game will be Georgia’s first NCAA Tournament game since the 2015 season. In that span, Gonzaga has played for two national championships.

But that doesn’t mean you should write in pen that Gonzaga will advance into the second round. This Georgia team knows it’s more than capable of winning an NCAA Tournament game for the first time since 2002.

“We didn’t come here just to be here,” sophomore guard Silas Demary Jr. said. “We came here to win games. So just come here with confidence and a chip on our shoulder that not a lot of people think we should be here. Just use that as fuel.”

Demary is a big reason Georgia finds itself in this spot. He averaged 13.4 points per game and led the team in assists this past season. He, guard Blue Cain and forward Dylan James are a key reason White’s team was able to break back into the NCAA Tournament this season.

It helps to have freshman standout Asa Newell as well. He leads Georgia in points per game (15.8) and rebounds per game (6.8) this season. Georgia has had a number of lottery picks between now and its last NCAA Tournament win, but Newell has found a way to impact the wins and losses column as well.

“He’s still going to be compliant in terms of making winning plays, passing to the guy that’s open, chasing offensive rebounds, closing out correctly,” White said of Newell. “He’s a winning player. He’s been a huge pleasure to coach. He’s a great teammate. He is humility. He is consistency. He’s a stud.”

Gonzaga isn’t without talent, as the West Coast Conference champions are led by big-man Graham Ike and guard Ryan Nembhard. Ike leads Gonzaga in points and rebounds, with 17.1 per game and 7.5 per game, respectively.

Nembhard, whose older brother Andrew played for White when he was the head coach at Florida, leads the country in assists this season, with 9.8 per game.

Georgia knows it will have to turn Nembhard into a scorer if it is to stifle the Gonzaga offense.

“He creates a lot of the offense,” Demary said of Nembhard. “I think he’s a great downhill guard at his size. I think he uses his size to his advantage a couple times. But I think if we can just limit him getting in the paint as much as we can, try to make him more of a scorer, although he can do that as well.

“If we can make him more as an aggressive scorer than him setting his teammates up, I think that’ll be good for us.”

Georgia may not have a lot of experience at the NCAA Tournament level, but it certainly has fought in a number of battles to get to this point. The SEC put 14 teams into the NCAA Tournament field.

Since Jan. 4, Georgia has played in 16 games against NCAA Tournament teams. Over that same span, Gonzaga has only played in only three, losing two of them to No. 7-seed Saint Mary’s.

Georgia sports wins over No. 1-seed Florida (West Region), No. 2-seed St. John’s (West) and No. 3-seed Kentucky (Midwest). Kentucky did beat Gonzaga 90-89 in December.

White and his team acknowledge there’s no replacement for NCAA Tournament experience. RJ Godfrey is the only member of the team with any, as he was on Clemson’s Elite Eight team last season.

But the night-in, night-out grind has prepped this Georgia team very well for what comes next.

“Those teams we play really hard, kind of prepared us just for these other good teams,” Godfrey said. “I’m just so thankful we played in the best conference in the history of the sport. It’s really just, I think it’s going to help us prepare us.”

Georgia’s game against Gonzaga is scheduled for approximately a 4:35 p.m. ET start on TBS. The winner of that game will face the winner of Houston and Southern Illinois-Edwardsville, which begins at 2 p.m. ET.