No Defense For Deacons’ Performance
The one absolutely undeniable thing that can be said about Dino Gaudio’s first 80 games as Wake Forest’s head coach is that he recognized the program’s fatal flaw and did something about it—by turning the Deacons from one of the ACC’s most obliging defensive teams into one of the toughest to score against.
Only that couldn’t be said tonight during the 79-58 cuffing at the hands of Georgia Tech.
I was all ready to write about how the Deacons began the game like a house ablaze only to be snuffed out almost instaneously, never to catch fire again. They made six of their first seven shots and the one miss, an errant jumper by Ish Smith, was followed in by Chas McFarland. So they scored on their first six possessions for a 13-6 lead.
For the rest of the game, they shot 15 of 57.
But by the time I had given the box score a good look, and talked with Gaudio and the players, it was obvious that the real story was how they had allowed their vaunted defese—ranked fifth in the nation in field-goal percentage defense (.359) and second in 3-point percentage defense (.257)—to be shredded pretty much beyond recognition. The Jackets shot 54 percent from the floor and 60 percent from beyond the arc. The previous best field-goal percentage against Wake this season was Miami’s 46 percent. The previous best 3-point percentage was the 44 percent made by both Purdue and Maryland.
Tech is not a great shooting team. The Jackets rank eighth in the ACC with a field-goal percentage of .458 and 10th with a 3-point percentage of .343. But on this night they were lights out. Derrick Favors hitting 5 of 7 wasn’t a scoop. He’s shooting 58 percent. But you know you really have it going when Brian Oliver, who was shooting 41 percent, makes 4 out of 5 from the floor and 3 of 4 from 3-point range, including one from the near corner that banked off the backboard and in. Meanwhile D’Andre Bell, who was shooting 40 percent, drills 5 of 8.
The temptation is to explain it as just one of those nights that happen to pretty much everybody from time to time, but to do so is to absolve the players of the responsibility of doing what they’re supposed to do—which is to keep a Brian Oliver from making 4 of 5 and a D’Andre Bell from making 5 of 8. Somewhere along the way the defense has to exert its will, or else you get rolled. I’m pretty sure that Dino will remind his team of that in the next few days.
There’s also a temptation to explain it as an aberration. The Deacons can only hope.