Our Vanderbilt Men’s Bball team played extremely well on both ends of the floor in an impressive 86-51 victory over Georgia in the first round of the SEC Tournament at Amalie Arena in Tampa.
With the victory, we move on to tonight’s second round game versus Alabama at approximately 7:30 CT on the SEC Network. We are now 16-15 overall with postseason hopes clearly in our line of sight. Georgia fell to 6-26 after a tough season. Could be tough for Tom Crean to keep his job, but he faced a lot of adversity this season when his best two players were lost for the year with injuries before the season even started. Seems like he’d get a pass for that. Still think he’s a good coach.
Scotty Pippen Jr. finished with 14, Myles Stute and Jordan Wright added 11 and freshman Shane Dezonie chipped in 10. It was just a complete team effort. It was awesome to have point guard Rodney Chatman back in the lineup. Rodney finished with 8 points. He just makes us more effective with his presence and his leadership. We out-rebounded them 43-31 and committed only 9 turnovers. Not superb offensively in the first half, but we were superb on the defensive end. Stack was very pleased with the first half defense when he spoke to Alyssa Lang of the SEC Network at halftime. We kept up the strong defense in the second half. They only shot 30% from the field for the game, 14-of-47, and 2-of-17 from trifecta, 12%, so spectacular effort on the defensive end. And we started canning some 3’s in the second half. We finished with 16 trifectas on 41 attempts, 39%, so well done. We were 11-of-21 in the second half. The first half we were only 5-of-20, so it took us a minute to get settled down, but once we did, we were knock your socks off good from deep. We were 6 of 9 from the line, so not bad. Not many opportunities. Georgia was 21-of-27, not sure why there was such a discrepancy in free throws. We were lock down on defense, I know that. Myles was 3-of-7 from 3, Jordan was 3-of-4, Trey Thomas was 2-of-6, and Shane Dezonie was 2-of-3. Shane played a terrific game, his best game in his young Commodore career. Trey was very active as always. Trey always helps in a big way when we’re successful. I thought Tyrin Lawrence played well, also. Tyrin had 7 points and a couple of boards. Our great senior, Drew Weikert, came off the bench and hesitated a little bit from behind the arc, but then drained a trifecta. Drew is a valuable player for us when he gets the opportunity. Jordan pulled down 7 boards and Myles added 5.
The Crimson Tide is 19-12 and finished 9-9 in SEC play. We were 7-11 in SEC play. In our first matchup with them at Memorial a couple of weeks back, it was a hard fought battle in which the Tide sank 22 of 25 free throws and came back from a 5 point deficit at halftime to win, 74-72. It was a heartbreaker for our team, but we have a new opportunity tonight to prove that we’re a postseason team. Jahvon Quninerly scored 19 for Alabama in our game with them and Scotty had 26 and 8 assists. Liam Robbins added 16. Jaden Shackelford leads them in scoring at 16.3 per game. Quinerly is next at 13.8. Keon Ellis adds 12 points per game. They have some physical inside players, so Liam and Q will need to play well. They out-rebounded us 41-37 in the last game, so that was pretty even. We were 27 of 36 from the line in that game, 75%, so we shot it pretty well from the stripe. When I talked to Stack about free throw shooting on our team Monday,he said he’s trying everything he can think of. A friend of mine, CK, looked up Stack’s free throw shooting percentage in his illustrious career in the NBA. Stack shot 82%. So you know Coach Stackhouse is trying everything to get the guys’ confidence at the stripe. I feel like we’ve been through the SEC wars and are battle tested now and will respond at the line in big moments.
Big game tonight for the team. I feel like we’re going to play well. Tough assignment, but we’ve got a lot of momentum.
The Men’s Tennis team pulled off a tremendous victory at the Currey Tennis Center yesterday in defeating No.19 Northwestern, 6-1. What an effort. Siim Troost and Michael Ross won in doubles, 7-5, and George Harwell/Max Freeman clinched the doubles point with a 6-3 victory.
In singles, Joubert Klopper won at No.2, No.3 Michael Ferreira won his match, at No.4, Freeman won also, at No.5 Jeremie Casabon won and at No.6 Troost won. Harwell fell in his match to No.67 Steven Forman, 6-4,6-2. Harwell is ranked No. 39, but still got us a doubles point and has been playing very well this year. We moved to 9-2 on the season and are ranked 41 by the ITA Rankings.
We now go to No.28 Texas A&M Friday at 6 PM CT for a huge matchup. If we can pull that off, we are really in business. Love what Coach Ian Duvenhage is doing with the guys. Sunday we’ll play Drake at 9 AM CT at the Currey Center. Drake is not presently in the top 75 rankings.
Will give you a recap of our major contest tonight in Tampa and more on the teams tomorrow and through the weekend. Anchor Down!