Xavier 77-78 Georgia: Almost doesn’t count in college basketball

Was this a good game? Xavier went toe to toe with the 33rd ranked team in the KenPom and led them very late. Was this a bad game? Xavier was an inexcusable 16-38 inside the arc to drop their season mark to 42%, one of the worst in the nation. Maybe it depends on what you were expecting.

Let’s start with the positives. Xavier was fearless in this game. They punched with a high-major for 16 minutes, had their usual lull to allow a 15-2 run to go down 14, then slowly dragged themselves back into the game and took the lead. Their 2-3 zone was extremely effective as Georgia went 2-16 behind the arc in the second half. Despite having no interior offense to speak of, they were somehow 9-17 at the rim, Xavier managed 1.05 points per possession.

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That came down to Xavier’s top four players. All Wright (17/2/0) is generously listed at 6-3 but is a sprite who lights up the offense. He was 1-7 inside the arc, but didn’t let that bother him and went 4-9 from deep. He’s shooting 50% on threes this season. Tre Carroll is incredibly aggravating to me, but went for 19/10/1 and got himself to the line ten times. Filip Borovicanin (12/12/4) was incredibly aggravating to a lot of Twitter, but he was Xavier’s most efficient offensive player and flashed the ability to continue making opportunities for everyone else. Finally, Jovan Milicevic (19/5/0) is clearly the guy on this team who wants to just take games over.

Milicevic did just that early, hitting (or “stroking” if you’re Scott Williams) three straight threes in one stretch. When he went cold and Xavier went inside, things unraveled. It was five straight from him that got Xavier back within single digits in the second half. From there, things got ugly. X settled into a zone, and then neither team could score. In one riveting stretch that lasted nearly five minutes, the teams that had scored 26 points in the first five minutes combined to score just seven.

But Xavier just kept working, and grinding, and pushing,…

Source link : https://sports.yahoo.com/article/xavier-77-78-georgia-almost-172427264.html

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Publish date : 2025-11-22 17:24:00

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