There are nine women’s basketball teams in Division I without a loss. One of them plays at 5:30 p.m. Saturday at McCamish Pavilion.
No. 17 Georgia Tech puts its 12-0 mark on the line against visiting No. 23 Nebraska. The Yellow Jackets are off to the best start in program history. Now they may have staked claim to being one of the better teams in the nation.
Tech, which beat Rice by 31 on Wednesday for coach Nell Fortner’s 100th win with the Jackets, is at or near the top of the ACC in assists, bench points, rebound margin, scoring defense, 3-pointers per game and 3-point defense. And the Jackets aren’t only beating teams, they are dominating to the tune of a 27.1 scoring margin.
“Our defense still has to come along,” Fortner said Wednesday. “The hard part for me as a coach is you don’t want to let off the defensive petal. And everybody has to understand that. I know they do understand it. The defensive effort and what you’re doing defensively is incredibly important. That can never wane.
“We got a big one coming up, and you always want to make sure that you’re holding yourself to a standard defensively.”
Nebraska (10-1) has reeled off five consecutive victories after a Nov. 22 loss to intown rival Creighton. Three Cornhuskers score at least 13 points per game led by 6-foot-3 senior center Alexis Markowski (who also brings in 8.1 rebounds per contest).
One of the best 3-point shooting and rebounding teams in the country, Nebraska went 23-12 last season and advanced to the second round of the NCAA Tournament.
Men draw Duke
After a three-game losing streak, the Tech men’s team got back on track Wednesday with a 91-82 win over Maryland-Baltimore County at McCamish Pavilion. Now it will try to break a five-game losing streak this season against major conference opponents when it hosts No. 5 Duke at noon Saturday.
“We’re not satisfied, we got more work to do,” Tech point guard Nait George said Wednesday. “We’ll get ready for the No. 5 team in the nation come Saturday.”
Tech did top Duke in December last year, a 72-68 thriller inside McCamish Pavilion when the Blue Devils were ranked No. 7 at the time. But the Jackets haven’t had any such victories through 11 games this season, Tech coach Damon Stoudamire’s second at Tech.
Stoudamire’s crew had three golden opportunities to do just that to start this month, with games at Oklahoma and North Carolina and against Northwestern in Milwaukee. They feel well short in all three.
“I’m looking forward to the Duke game to see the growth. I need to see growth,” Stoudamire said Wednesday. “We gotta start learning from the games that we lose. In reality, for me, you either win or you learn. As a player I never looked at a loss as a loss. I either won or I learned from it. Because I wasn’t gonna make the same mistake twice. That’s where we gotta become better. Period.”
Duke rolls into town having won five in a row after a three-point loss to No. 8 Kansas in Las Vegas in November. Those five victories have come by an average margin of 17.2 points.
The star of the show for the Blue Devils (9-2, 1-0) is Cooper Flagg, a freshman who is scoring 16.6 points per game to go with nine rebounds per contest. The 6-foot-9, 205-pound shooting forward is making 41.8% of his shots and leads Duke with 40 assists.
Freshman forward Kon Knueppel (11.6) and junior guard Tyrese Proctor (11.4) also are scoring in double figures for a Duke team that leads the ACC in shooting defense, scoring defense and 3′s per game.
“There’s no question I know we can play with ‘em,” Stoudamire added. “But can we beat ‘em? Can we finish the game? To beat a team like Duke you gotta play for 40 minutes. You can’t have lulls in the game. And that’s what I wanna see.”
About the Author
