With 10 minutes left in the first half, Connecticut Head Coach Jim Calhoun’s newly-unranked Huskies were more than hanging with their Georgetown brethren.

Star freshman center Andre Drummond had eight points on three dunks and a layup, Georgetown’s offense was struggling and Connecticut looked much more like the team many thought it would be at the beginning of the year than the one that had lost five of its past seven games. But the No. 14 Hoyas persevered, led by a trio of veterans that simply refused to let their team lose consecutive conference games for the second time this year.

Senior guard Jason Clark was the primary reason the Hoyaswere even in the game after Drummond’s early explosion, as his seven early points prevented the Huskies from running away with the game.

“I don’t know that we struggled on offense [early on],” Head Coach John Thompson III said. “We struggled on defense. … [But] Jason early on had us going fairly well.”

Clark was also a key cog in a Georgetown defense that recovered from its early struggles to hold Connecticut to just eight points in nearly 20 minutes beginning at the 16:36 mark of the first half. But just as the Blue and Gray offense started to gather some momentum, disaster struck. Clark picked up his second foul of the game with just over eight minutes to go before halftime and was benched for the rest of the half 25 seconds later.

When Clark committed his second foul, the Hoyas were up, 18-15, thanks to a three from junior forward Hollis Thompson, his first basket of the game. Senior center Henry Sims, while crucial in dealing with Drummond, had been invisible offensively, contributing just one point to Georgetown’s cause. UConn’s Tyler Olander scored the next basket, but after that it was all Sims and Thompson. The frontcourt duo exploded offensively, accounting for Georgetown’s last 17 points of the first half as well as the first six after halftime.

“I remember Sims as a high school player in Baltimore,” Calhoun said after the game. “He really as improved as a player, he’s a nice guy to throw it into because he can do a lot with the ball.”

“We were just running our offense, and we had an inside and outside presence,” Thompson said of his and Sims’ half-ending scoring spree.

Sims ended the game with 13 points, with no basket more emphatic than a second-half dunk over sophomore forward Jeremy Lamb that stretched the Blue and Gray’s lead to 12, caused Calhoun to burn a timeout and brought the Verizon Center crowd to its feet.

“It was definitely a momentum shifter,” Sims said of his dunk. “It made the crowd come alive.”

The fans weren’t the only people impressed by the play. Thompson lit up when asked to describe the team’s feelings after Sims’ slam.

“Everybody was just like ‘Woah! On his head!'” Thompson said. “It was a great dunk.”

While the junior may not have had a moment as emphatic as Sims did, his contributions did not go unappreciated by his coach or his teammates.

“I thought this was one of the better games that Hollis has played,” Thompson III said. “He did so many things. Look at the stat sheet — he had 18 and nine [and] he was key in [our] zone defense.”

Clark’s commentary was somewhat simpler.

“The shots were falling for [Thompson],” he said. “So we kept giving him the ball.”

The performance was a far cry from Thompson’s lethargic play against Pittsburgh, a game in which the Los Angeles native was invisible before scoring eight points in the final minute with the game out of reach.

“This was the exact opposite of the Pittsburgh game [where] he was just floating,” Thompson III said. “He wasn’t floating today, he was an active part of every aspect of the game and he was very effective in every aspect of the game.”

Clark also had a role to play in the second half, once Thompson and Sims’ scoring pace slacked off a little bit. After a series of Georgetown miscues allowed the visitors to get back within six — the closest they’d been since halftime —Thompson III burned a timeout. Clark responded by scoring the first two baskets in the 6-0 run that was capped off by Sims’ thunderous dunk and put the game out of reach.

“It just came within our offense,” Clark said of his two baskets. “We were running on something that we’ve been working on for awhile that a lot of teams haven’t seen, and they were having trouble guarding our offense.”

If Sims, Thompson and Clark play the way they did today down the stretch, UConn won’t be the only team to struggle with the Georgetown offense.