Georgia coach knows he watched unbelievable performance from Oscar Tshiebwe

Oscar Tshiebwe knew Georgia could not stop him Tuesday night. (Vicky Graff Photo)

Georgia coach Mike White knew how good Oscar Tshiebwe was because when he was coaching at Florida last season the UK center got 27 points and 19 rebounds one game and 27 points and 14 rebounds in another game against the Gators.

If he watched last year’s UK-Georgia game, he also saw Tshiebwe get 29 points and 17 rebounds that game.

Yet despite Tshiebwe being what White called “incredibly dominant” against the Gators last season, the Georgia coach still elected to basically play Tshiebwe without bringing extra players to defend him.

That enabled Tshiebwe to go 12 of 20 from the field and 13 of 18 at the foul line to score 37 points in Kentucky’s 85-71 comeback win. He also pulled off 24 rebounds.

White called Tshiebwe “unbelievably dominant” in this game and didn’t remember seeing an opponent do what the UK senior did.

“He was unbelievable. Credit him and his mentality, his motor and physical toughness, his physicality that he played with, even defensively. We just didn’t match it. At all,” White said.

Tshiebwe had 11 offensive rebounds, one reason UK got 14 more shots than the Bulldogs.

“Our energy level early in the second half didn’t match our first half efforts and that’s on me,” White said.  “Obviously, Oscar and Kentucky had a lot to do with that.”

Georgia had an 11-point lead in the first half against UK and still led 42-34 at halftime before Tshiebwe took over in the second half and was unstoppable.

“When you’re preparing for Oscar, no matter what you do, you tell yourself as a coach, ‘He’s going to find a way to get a double-double.’ It’s going to be hard for him not too. He just plays so hard and you don’t want those guys to complement his production with made 3’s,” the Georgia coach said.

“With (Antonio) Reeves and (Cason) Wallace getting going, and CJ Frederick is an X-factor for those guys, so we just decided to go solo on him and obviously it wasn’t the right decision. We doubled him some more in the second half, got into some rotations and he continued to just go get it off the glass.

“So I don’t know, we’ll have to watch film to see what we could’ve done better. We could’ve stopped a few of those post touches in the second half. There were a couple of guys we could have gapped off of. When we doubled him and kicked it out, he still got it. He got it off missed free throws and missed field goals, he was unbelievable.”