Panthers playing up to expectations

Georgia State four wins from repeating as Sun Belt champs.

The expectations placed on Georgia State’s men’s basketball team before the season may have been too much at the time.

With the addition of Louisville transfer Kevin Ware to a team that had two possible NBA draft picks, R. J. Hunter and Ryan Harrow, and a nucleus of other players returning, fulfilling predictions of dark-horse runs and CBS pundits’ plaudits became too big too fast.

“In November, we were worrying about the NCAA tournament. In December, we were worrying about the league,” coach Ron Hunter said. “The whole season started too big for us.”

It took until February for the team to relax and realize that if they didn’t start winning the next game — not the ones in March — all those dreams from November likely would become nightmares.

Now winners of eight of their past nine games and in a three-way tie for first in the Sun Belt Conference, the Panthers (198, 12-4) face a three-game road stretch, followed by a home finale against Georgia Southern, that may determine their chances of making it to the NCAA tournament.

If Georgia State wins all four, which includes a game against co-leader Louisiana-Monroe, it will repeat as conference champ and earn the No. 1 seed going into the conference tournament in New Orleans.

With the top seed comes a bye to the semifinals that would leave the Panthers two wins from the NCAA tournament, a year after losing in the conference final to Louisiana-Lafayette.

The road stretch begins at Arkansas-Little Rock tonight and continues at Troy on Saturday, a pair of games that center Curtis Washington said are very important because both teams are fighting to make the conference tournament.

“They will be desperate, and we will have to play desperate,” Washington said. “The more games we win, we are putting ourselves into better position. But we can’t look too far ahead.”

Washington agreed with his coach that looking too far ahead was a big issue for the team early in the season.

The team was too focused on trying to prove to everyone that it deserved the hype it was receiving from handfuls of national publications. Road losses to Iowa State, Colorado State, Old Dominion and Wisconsin-Green Bay followed.

Those were followed by conference losses to Texas State, Louisiana-Lafayette and Appa- lachian State.

The losses, though, seemed to help the team relax. Once they were relaxed, they could focus.

Washington said he could sense the change five or six games ago, which is when the team began a stretch of holding each of its opponents to less than 30-percent shooting. That’s a streak unmatched by any Division I team dating to at least 1995-96.

The wins started to pile up.

“At the beginning of the season the whole demeanor was different: We have to prove to everyone we are as good as everyone thinks we are,” Washington said. “Now, we aren’t worried about that.

“Fans will come and go. When you are doing great, everybody is on there. We are just worried about bringing the same intensity and playing how we play every time we step on the court. And then we will move on to the next game.”

HYOSUB SHIN / Georgia State coach Ron Hunter has the Panthers playing relaxed basketball, which is why they have won 8 of 9 and are in a three-way tie for first in the Sun Belt Conference.