Louisville basketball: Cards dominate Georgia Tech from start to finish

Chris Mack and the Louisville basketball program got hot early against Georgia Tech on the road, and never looked back.

The Louisville basketball program came into Saturday’s matchup with the 10-7 Georgia Tech Yellow Jackets riding some serious momentum after knocking off North Carolina on the road and defeating Boston College in arguably one of their best individual performances in recent memory in Jordan Nwora’s 32 points.

Georgia Tech, a team known for their defensive prowess, presented a challenge for Louisville but with three of their top players out, including leading scorer Jose Alvarado, the odds were stacked against the Yellow Jackets.

Both teams got off to a slow start offensively, combining to go 7-25 through the first 9 minutes of the game. But it was Louisville who jumped out to a ten point lead, in which most of their points came off Georgia Tech turnovers.

One thing the Cards have really struggled with this season has been keeping their foot on the pedal when they get up by big amounts, with the Boston College game on Wednesday night being a perfect example. That was no issue on Saturday afternoon for Louisville, as Jordan Nwora and Malik Williams put their foots in the throat of Georgia Tech, combining for 25 of Louisville’s first 31 points, helping the Cards extend the lead to 31-6 at the 5:00 minute mark.

Even as Georgia Tech went on a mini 6-0 run, the Cards kept pushing and extended the lead to 41-16 at half time. Nwora, who played the entire first half, led all scorers (including the entire Georgia Tech team) with 21 points on 8/12 shooting. Louisville held Georgia Tech to just 6/24 from the field, including 0/6 from three, and only three Yellow Jackets scored. UofL forced 10 turnovers out of the Yellow Jackets and out rebounded them by a margin of 23 to 15.

Needless to say, the Cards dominated the first half in Atlanta.

The second half was much of the same as Louisville didn’t allow Georgia Tech to get back within 25 points. While the Cards didn’t have anywhere as big of a scoring half as they did in the first, they continued to do the little things that kept them up big.

Even with Jordan Nwora only scoring 4 points, Louisville still managed to put up 36 points as they were led by big man Steven Enoch who totaled 11 points in the second half.

Louisville played nearly a perfect game in Atlanta, and even though it was against the worst team in the ACC, it’s still a big deal for the Cards. As mentioned on the broadcast, three of the Cards next five games will be against ranked teams, getting started on Wednesday night against 17th ranked North Carolina State.

Chris Mack, who clearly was frustrated with some of the minor details in the second half, should be pleased with his teams performance and effort in a game that easily could have been a trap.

MVP: There’s no question that the MVP of this game was Jordan Nwora. His 21 points in the first half set the tone for the Cards and not only did he play within himself to get his 25 total points he did a lot of other great things that won’t show up in the stat sheet to help Louisville move to 4-1 in the ACC.

LVP: For Louisville there really was no least valuable player as everyone did a little something to help get the victory. However, Raycom Sports is awful and will always be awful. The game started with audio that sounded like it was being recorded on a plane in mid-flight and the picture quality looked like garbage. I am looking forward to every ESPN game on the schedule.

Also, Josh Pastner sucks.

X-Factor: There was no player whose play was more important than Christen Cunningham, who finished with 9 points, 11 assists, and an incredible zero turnovers. Our own Ethan Sprowles predicted earlier this season that he would lead the ACC in assists and each game he is getting closer and closer. In his last five games, CC has 34 assists to just 9 turnovers.

The full boxscore for Louisville vs. Georgia Tech can be found here.