Bulldogs still must clean up their act

ATHENS — Georgia was well into the teens in turnovers against Tennessee on Saturday when the Bulldogs committed yet another one and coach Mark Fox, peeved and disgusted, called a timeout.

“I said, ‘Guys, this ball is paying your way to school, OK? So let’s start taking care of it,’” Fox recounted Tuesday.

The Bulldogs continued to struggle and ended up with a season-worst 20 turnovers against the Volunteers. They won anyway but, of course, the miscues made it much more difficult than it should have been. Georgia turned it over twice in the final 2:43 and needed Tennessee to miss a last-second shot to hang on for a 56-53 victory.

“We had some careless plays,” Fox said. “(Nemanja Djurisic) didn’t take a dribble in the open court, and (it) cost

us a layup. Charles (Mann) has an easy little bounce pass that he just throws lazily. We just did some things carelessly.”

A similar performance likely won’t produce a similar result the next time out. The Bulldogs (15-7, 6-4 SEC) travel to College Station, Texas, for tonight’s date against Texas A&M. The Aggies (16-6, 7-3) feature one of the stronger perimeter groups in the league.

A&M is paced by point guard Alex Caruso, who leads the SEC with 5.8 assists per game. Wings Danuel House and Jalen Jones rank 10th and 11th in the conference in scoring, at 14.1 and 14.0 points per game, respectively. House was named the SEC’s player of the week last week after averaging 17.5 points and shooting a blistering 72.7 percent from 3-point range.

Meanwhile, Georgia’s guards on the whole have been a team strength most of the season. But they have some work to do with ballhandling. Mann and Kenny Gaines, Georgia’s starters on the wings, finished with 11 turnovers between them against Tennessee. The Bulldogs are averaging 14.8 turnovers in SEC games and have committed 63 — or an average of 15.7 — in the past four outings.

“We’ve been playing awful when it comes to our standards,” point guard J. J. Frazier said. “Somehow we’ve been finding ways to win, but we’re going to clean it up.”

The team’s overall health hasn’t helped. Georgia has played the past five weeks without Juwan Parker (Achilles) and Kenny Paul Geno (wrist), who normally man the wing position that Mann is having to play. With two guards out, that has forced walk-on Taylor Echols into the rotation and saddled Frazier, Mann and Gaines with significantly more minutes. They’ve played fewer than 30 minutes only twice between them during this stretch.

Senior power forward Marcus Thornton missed two games after suffering a concussion against Vanderbilt on Jan. 27. He returned against the Vols, but the Bulldogs struggled in their attempts to get the ball inside to him.

“Marcus’ injury and absence was huge because (the guards) saw a whole different style of defense than people would be able to play if Marcus was in the game,” Fox said. “And, if you look at the game this weekend, we win the game because of Kenny Gaines’ and Charles Mann’s defense. They turned it over too much, and I wasn’t happy about that, but they were as good defensively as they’ve been all year.”

Gaines and Mann teamed to hold 6-6 wing Josh Richardson, Tennessee’s leading scorer, to two points. Such perimeter defense will come in handy against the Aggies’ high-scoring wings. The good news is that Fox predicts a not-too-distant return for Parker, who did some light work in practice Tuesday. Geno should not be terribly far behind.

The thought of getting his team back to something resembling full strength is almost too tempting for Fox to contemplate.

“If we can get them all healthy and playing the same place every day,” he said, “I think we can have a really good team.”