Oct. 25, 2009
Tech Pictures from Sunday
ACC Operation Basketball theACC.com Photo Gallery
Greensboro, N.C. –
Georgia Tech’s basketball team was picked to finish fourth in the Atlantic Coast Conference Sunday in a vote of members of the media attending the ACC’s Operation Basketball at the Grandover Resort.
The Yellow Jackets, voted by some as low as ninth, also received two first-place votes. Duke, with 25 first-place votes, and North Carolina, with 20, tied for first place in voting with 545 points. Clemson, with 409 points, was picked to finish third, and Tech totaled 387 points.
“Our goal is to finish higher than that,” said Tech head coach Paul Hewitt, whose team last finished as high as fourth in 2004.
The rest of the predicted order of finish – Maryland, Wake Forest (1 first-place vote), Florida State, Virginia Tech, Boston College, Miami, Virginia and NC State.
Freshman Derrick Favors, a 6-9 forward from Atlanta, received 40 of 48 votes as the pre-season ACC Rookie of the Year. If he wins the honor at the end of the year, he would be the 11th Tech player to do so. Duke’s Kyle Singler led voting for the league’s pre-season player of the year honor.
The pre-season All-ACC team included, in order of most votes received, Maryland’s Greivis Vasquez, Clemson’s Trevor Booker, Singler, Virginia Tech’s Malcolm Delaney and North Carolina’s Ed Davis.
Tech, which has just completed its second week of pre-season practice, hosts an exhibition game against Indiana University of Pennsylvania on Nov. 8, and opens its regular season at home Nov. 14 against Florida A&M.
