Georgia basketball loses valiant effort against LSU

Georgia basketball lost to a ranked LSU team yesterday in a valiant effort where Tom Crean’s team really stepped up for the first time this year.

Tom Crean has a had an up and down few weeks with Georgia basketball now in the middle of its SEC schedule. Since the turn of the year, the Bulldogs have won only two of thirteen games. That’s a really rough stretch that would have most fans wailing. However, during this period, he’s also landed the commitment from Anthony Edwards, the highest ranked player ever to come to UGA. So it’s not exactly been all bad.

While his team might have lost again against LSU this weekend, the level of play that we saw from them was considerably better. They pushed the 19th best team in the country right now and came really, really close to upsetting them in the 83-79 loss. Nicolas Claxton has stepped up this season and once again, he was great in this game, accounting for 17 points, 6 rebounds, and 4 assists.

While fans don’t want to be cheering ‘moral victories’ at the Stegman, it’s worth pointing out that Crean didn’t exactly inherit much from Mark Fox. Claxton and Rayshaun Hammonds both have the potential to be good players, but the rest of this roster is pretty weak. Crean has some young players with talent who have some developing to do but the older guys really do have issues, particularly the guards. His system needs quality guards who can make shots and score and that’s something that Mark Fox didn’t do a great job recruiting or developing.

The UGA frontcourt remains a solid unit but until that backcourt is able to step up and reduce their turnovers, Crean’s team is going to struggle. What we saw yesterday however was a flash of what this team could look like next year when hopefully UGA will have more talent with Edwards joining. Until then, we’ll probably have a few more of these games. Hopefully, some of these moral victories can just become plain wins before the season ends.