Bobby Knight would be proud.
Green Bay coach Doug Gottlieb threw a chair in disgust as he walked off the court Thursday night following his team’s implosion in an 80-78 home loss to Robert Morris.
“I’m encouraged by our effort and our defense and how we executed and that was just embarrassing how we lost the game,” Gottlieb told reporters. “You lost the game you probably should have won.”
The Phoenix led by 11 with under four minutes to go, a deficit the Colonials furiously cut into before Darius Livingston’s 3-pointer put them ahead with 22 seconds to go.
Green Bay tied it on a free throw, which paved the pay for Nikolaos Chitikoudis’s game-winning layup with 2.4 seconds left to snatch the win for Robert Morris.
What really seemed to set Gottlieb off, however, was the 10-second violation his team incurred for not advancing the ball past midcourt with 35.7 seconds left.
“We are actually a good basketball team,” said the second-year coach who doubles as a nationally syndicated Fox Sports radio host. “I know it is surprising to people. We are actually pretty good, but we played like idiots at the end of the game.”
The Phoenix fell to 4-6 following the setback in their Horizon League opener, but all is not lost.
Green Bay has already matched its win total from last season, a 4-28 debacle in Gottlieb’s first season at the helm after his surprise hiring.
Still, the manner of the loss was enough to cause the 49-year-old, a college basketball star at Notre Dame and Oklahoma State in the late 1990s, to furiously walk into the tunnel and chuck a chair.
“Unbelievably frustrating. Like, unbelievably frustrating,” he said. “You do everything. You prepare them. They have the game and they just have to bring it home and we just did not.”
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