’Noles need rookies to help snap slump
TALLAHASSEE — Florida State forward Terance Mann was days away from leading his prep team to the New Hampshire Class AA state championship a year ago.
Dwayne Bacon had just helped Oak Hill Academy (Mouth of Wilson, Va.) earn its 33rd win of the season and Malik Beasley was about a week from guiding St. Francis to a Class A state title in Georgia.
Now, a year later, the three freshmen are dealing with consistent losing for the first time in their respective careers. FSU (16-12, 6-10 ACC) is in the midst of a five-game losing streak and its once realistic hopes of making the NCAA Tournament are quickly fading away.
The Seminoles can still make a late push to avoid missing the tournament for a fourth consecutive season, but the margin for error is narrow. FSU hosts No. 23 Notre Dame (19-8,10-5 ACC) at 4 p.m. today (ESPN2) and will need a lift from its freshmen if it wants to get out of this tailspin.
“Reality is setting in that this is the ACC, and there’s absolutely no way you can prepare [the freshmen] for it until you go through it,” FSU coach Leonard Hamilton said.
Learning to deal with failure is an inevitable part of college athletics. Most players going from winning at a high level — if not the highest level — in high school to feeling their way through ups and downs during the course of a college season.
The past couple weeks, however, have been particularly brutal for the FSU freshmen. Consider that the Seminoles had just earned their fourth consecutive win on Feb. 6 against Wake Forest, with Bacon and Beasley scoring a combined 27 points in the contest. Mann was establishing himself as a stat-stuffing role player in that same span. Then the collapse began. FSU squandered an opportunity to steal a game against rival Miami, dug itself a deep hole before coming up short in a comeback bid against downtrodden Georgia Tech, fell apart late against Virginia Tech and sandwiched those losses with double-digit defeats against Syracuse and Duke.
“I feel that this team is growing up without the protection of veterans, and they’re learning a lot of things that we were trying to teach earlier on,” Hamilton said.
It is not that the freshmen are playing poorly, but they are not all clicking simultaneously. The trio is averaging a combined 29.8 points per game during the losing streak and has had bright moments, such as Bacon’s 22-point outburst against Virginia Tech or Mann’s 18 points versus Georgia Tech.
The freshmen are not incapable of getting the team back on track, but it’s tough to get through a stretch like this for players who have never been in this position before.
Any potential turnaround for FSU will not be easy, however, as Notre Dame has won four out of its last five games and features a starting lineup that includes four upperclassmen. Junior guard Demetrius Jackson averages 16.4 points per game, 4.9 assists and 3.5 rebounds per game, and spearheads an offense that Hamilton described as the most efficient group he’s seen all season.
“It just seems like it’s one savvy, experienced group after another,” Hamilton said. “… Against Notre Dame, you can’t afford dry spells because, from an efficiency standpoint, they’re such good shooters that they make you pay.”
That type of effectiveness puts pressure on FSU defensively, as well as on the freshmen to keep pace on offense.
“I’m expecting us to keep growing up,” Hamilton said. “But now I’m hoping we can go on our run in these last couple games and go into the ACC tournament.”