Georgia Tech was leading Duke 26-12 in the first half of today’s ACC quarterfinal and it looked like the Yellow Jackets were in position to pull the ultimate stunner. However, Duke rallied after injury to star player Cooper Flagg and they defeated the Yellow Jackets 78-70 and will move on to face the winner of North Carolina/Wake Forest.
After the game, Georgia Tech head coach Damon Stoudamire spoke with the media and here is everything that he had to say:
“Proud of my guys. I thought we played hard. We fought through a lot of things all season long. We’ve had a lot of injuries and different things. It’s part of it. It happens. But they never made excuses, and I’m happy and proud to have coached them based on that. They fought, they fought, they fought, they fought, and just proud of them. Today’s game, I thought the last four minutes from probably the first four minutes of the second half, the game got away from us a little bit, and when I say that, Duke is a team of runs. I thought they did a good job overall collectively in the game withstanding those runs, but those two runs hurt us. We just couldn’t weather the storm.
With us not scoring, being able to stop the bleeding during that drought, quite frankly, I’m going to date — these guys wouldn’t even know, and if you’re old enough to remember, it reminded me when I played for the Portland Trail Blazers and the Lakers beat us in Game 7 in 2000. And all we had to do was score one bucket maybe early and break that run, but it ended up being 18-0 and Kobe throws a lob to Shaq, and all of rest of it and the rest is history. We was fighting uphill from that, to be honest with you. But these guys right here, and the rest of the guys in the locker room, they did a hell of a job of fighting. We don’t quit. I’m proud of them for that.”
“I think that him getting hurt was unfortunate. But at the same time, too, Duke is a good team, and they’ve got to figure out what’s — they probably will figure it out. They have a lot of talented guys. But you never want to see anybody get hurt, and as we’ve navigated through a lot of things, yes, we might not be in the hunt to win a National Championship, but we had several injuries all season long, and that’s a part of it. You have to take a next-man approach. I don’t think that us feeling like we can win because Cooper was or wasn’t in the game, to me, that’s kind of an indictment on my group. You know what I mean? We didn’t win the game, and had we won the game, it’s still unfortunate that he got injured, but at the same time, too, Duke has a roster full of really good players, and we’ve played them two times, and Knueppel has hurt us, probably more than Flagg. I just think that that’s something that happens, and it’s part of the game. We don’t want him to be injured because there’s nothing good in anybody getting injured, and I can be the first to speak on that. But I don’t think these guys, because of who I am, it didn’t matter, and had we won the game, they probably would have said they wanted to beat them with him on the floor. I won’t answer no more questions for them, but I’ll take that one.”
” It just depends on how you look at it. I choose to look at it as more positives. My approach probably is — I’m not going to say it’s different than everybody’s, but everybody has a formula, a system, and what they have intact. I think that regardless of the portal, it’s free agency, so that’s how I look at it. You’ve got to try to retain the players you want in your locker room. A lot of that process started months ago. You’ve got to make sure that that’s intact because it’s like being in New York City; you’ve got that black market, so there’s a lot of tampering going on, so you have to be careful, and you’ve got to make sure that you’re taking care of home. From there then, you put on your bulletin board of what your needs are, and then you just go from there. You have to build — in a perfect world, you don’t want to start from scratch every year. That’s hard. But if you’ve got a base, you keep those guys, and I’d say the biggest thing is you can’t never get too high and too low on the players that you have, and you’ve got to make sure that you’re not making a hasty decision if you’re getting somebody, because a lot of times in this speed-dating process of the transfer portal, you can land on the wrong guy, and the wrong guy can hurt your program and set your program back, and that’s just as much detrimental as anything else.”
“Yeah, there’s a lot of times in coaching you change and you do different things. You adapt to what you have. I think that’s a part of coaching. Stubborn coaching is not adapting to what you have. Over the course of the last two, three months, I think this is more what I’m used to. It won’t be any looking back for me. I think where I came from and how I was taught, the game was way different than how the game is taught in 2025. But I think there’s a lot of parallels, and you’ve got to teach.
You’ve got to be a teacher, and then you’ve got to show players that you care about them, because if you don’t show them you care about them, they’re not going to let you coach them. So that’s what you see a lot of right now. Those are the two most important things. We did a lot of that. In a crazy type of way, the injuries that we had allowed us to kind of do a lot more of the teaching part, because as you go and you start doing different things, you start to skip steps, but it’s a process regardless. That’s been big for me as a head coach. This probably has been one of the funner years that I’ve had based on all the injuries that we had because you’re trying to find a different way to win a game each and every game. And this added theory, I never really let the trainer tell me about guys unless they were going to play because it just messes you up as a coach when you’re asking every day and you just don’t know. It kind of puts you in a mindset of — quite frankly, you get mad at the player at times and it’s not their fault. You roll with your punches and you allow them to do the things they need to do to get back on the floor.
This was a great year from that standpoint. I learned patience. I learned perseverance, and I learned a lot more about each individual on my team and learned a lot more about each coach and how I want to move forward going into year three of being at Tech.”
“Being physical. We wanted to be really physical. We watched a lot of — Clemson, as a staff, we watched the Clemson game, and Clemson did a good job of being really physical with them, trying to make it hard on catches, entry passes and all the things of that nature. Those are the things that we want to do, and we were able to do that for that first half. We held up for the first 17 and a half minutes or so, and that was pretty much it. The one thing about it is, Duke is not trying to trick you. It’s been like that since the beginning of time. They’re not trying to trick you. They’re not doing any gimmicks. It’s pretty straightforward. I thought our guys did a good job of handling that for the first 17 and a half minutes.”
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