ATHENS – Georgia basketball coach Mike White did not know what he asked for when he added High Point to the team’s list of late-year, pre-SEC competition.

White, like many others, did not expect the Panthers’ (8-3) remarkable start to the season. High Point, under first-year head coach and former Creighton assistant Alan Huss, ranks ninth in the country in points per game (89.1) and 3-pointers made (105).

The Panthers will ride a five-game winning streak into Stegeman Coliseum to face the Bulldogs (6-3) at 5:30 p.m. on Saturday.

Georgia will see its first game action since taking an 11-day break for final exams. That marks UGA’s longest game break of the season by far, a break that could mean trouble for the Bulldog defense if it comes out rusty against High Point’s electric attack.

“Coming off exams, quite honestly, if we had known this team was going to be this good in Year One of the new era, I’m not sure this would have been the team we’d have signed up for tomorrow,” White said. “It’s more of a challenge than we originally signed up for.”

“The concern is that we can shake the dust off pretty quickly in that first half because we haven’t played in a while.”

Saturday might provide a stronger opponent than White expected, but tough competition is nothing new to the Bulldogs this season. Georgia has faced six high major teams already, including two projected NCAA Tournament teams and a “first team out” in Joe Lunardi’s “Bracketology.”

Yet White believes that High Point’s offense bests every opponent UGA has faced this season besides a 12th-ranked Miami team fresh off a Final Four appearance.

“They run a bunch of different stuff offensively, they’ve got great tempo, they attack close-outs, they share it,” White said. “A bunch of guys that can score on all three levels. They can score in a variety of ways, as well.”

Active hands from perimeter defenders like Silas Demary Jr. could go a long way in slowing the Panthers’ tempo. Demary Jr., the highest-ranked member of Georgia’s 2023 recruiting class, leads the Bulldogs with 1.4 steals per game from his point guard position.

Lanky guards Jabri Abdur-Rahim and RJ Melendez have pestered perimeter offenses to complement red-hot scoring of their own.

Abdur-Rahim, averaging a team-leading 13 points per game, is shooting an excellent 42 percent from 3-point range this season. Melendez has scored 36 points in his last three games, adding 22 rebounds with a couple blocks and steals.

Indeed, the variety of weapons High Point boasts could help sharpen the Bulldog defense as it nears a daunting SEC slate in 2024.

White, whose emphasis on defensive dominance is often echoed by his players, is pleased by UGA’s defensive development. The ninth-year SEC coach still hungers for more stops, turnovers and havoc as conference play looms closer.

“I’m proud of this group (and) how far they’ve come from a defensive standpoint, their buy-in, their connectivity defensively,” he said. “If you’re going to compete with the best teams in the SEC in the best defensive conference in college basketball, you better guard somebody.”

White can add another small achievement to his short tenure in Athens on Saturday. A win would extend Georgia’s win streak to five games, the longest under White’s leadership.

It would also be UGA’s longest win streak since December of 2020.

Georgia, a 9.5-point favorite per FanDuel, is 2-0 all-time against High Point.