If the style of play hadn’t already reminded the Hoyas, three losses in its first four league games have taught Georgetown the hard way that the Big East is a different animal.

Following an impressive 11-1 non-conference season that was designed to simulate league play, the Hoyas (12-4, 1-3 Big East) continued their worst basketball of the season in a 65-59 loss to West Virginia (10-4, 2-2 Big East) on Saturday that was capped off by four straight Georgetown turnovers to end the game.

“It’s a typical Big East game,” Head Coach John Thompson III said in the postgame press conference. “It’d be easy to sit here and say that’s how the ball bounces, but we are in a place we don’t want to be right now and everyone in that locker room, from myself on down, has to figure out how to get us out of this place. We’re the same group of guys that was in there two or three weeks ago, and now we just have to get back to doing the things that put us in that position.”

Guard Casey Mitchell led the Mountaineers with 28 points with star forward Kevin Jones chipping in 15 points and six rebounds. With 10 different players in the scoring column, the Hoyas were paced by junior guard Jason Clark’s 16 points and six rebounds.

For the second straight game, Georgetown’s loss had a lot to do with the struggles of senior guards and captains Austin Freeman and Chris Wright. Freeman did not score until he made 1-of-2 free throws at the 14:50 mark of the second half and finished with 11 points on 3-for-8 shooting. With freshman guard Markel Starks logging quality second-half minutes, Wright had nine points on 3-of-13 from the field and just one assist.

“I wasn’t really aggressive in the first half,” Freeman said. “I wasn’t trying to execute or run our offense in the first half and I played pretty passive in the first half. But in the second half I tried to be more aggressive and tried to help [myself] get an easy one and help my teammates get one, too.”

“Our confidence as a team, the morale is a little down because of the way we’ve been losing these three games but we have to stay together,” Wright said. “We have good enough players that we’re going to come out of this and we’re going to be alright. We really need to focus and stick to what we know and stick to our gameplan offensively and defensively.”

As a team, Georgetown continued its cold spell from beyond the arc with a 5-for-17 performance that included 3-of-13 from Freeman and Wright, but the Hoyas did manage 50 percent from the field and limited the Mountaineers to 40.4 percent. One of the nation’s leading assist teams during the first half of the college basketball season, Georgetown had only 10 assists on 22 makes.

While Georgetown came out with energy, 18 turnovers – five by Wright and four by Clark – and its performance on the glass plagued the Hoyas from start to finish. Both teams made sloppy passes early on, and with the game hanging in the balance in the final minutes, Georgetown committed crucial turnovers on its final four possessions before a last-ditch three-point attempt by Wright. And on the afternoon, the Hoyas were outmanned 14-2 on the offensive boards.

“That’s an issue that has been addressed,” Thompson said of his team’s rebounding effort. “That’s an issue that will be addressed, that’s something that we need to take care of. You go through 20, 30 seconds of good defense without realizing that the possession ends when you have the ball and not when the shot is taken. And so that’s something that has to be addressed.”

“It’s effort,” Clark said. “We’ve got to do better. We’ve got to want it more than the other team.”

To make things more difficult for themselves, the Hoyas continued to display their seeming inability to defend the paint without fouling, as West Virginia got to the line 24 times to just 11 for Georgetown.

“I don’t know the answer to [the free-throw discrepancy],” Thompson said. “I’ll have to take a look at that. We’re fouling more than they are is the answer to that question.”

In the first meeting between the Hoyas and Mountaineers since last year’s Big East tournament championship game, back-and-forth runs defined the action. West Virginia opened on a 12-7 spurt, only to be answered by a 12-1 Georgetown run capped by a Clark baseline jumper that opened up a six-point lead with 7:58 to go in the first half. A John Flowers three-pointer then finished a 16-6 Mountaineer stretch going into halftime.

After Mitchell and Freeman traded two three-pointers each, the game was tied at 52 with 7:08 to play in the ballgame, but the Mountaineers closed it out on a 13-7 run that included four Georgetown turnovers in the final two minutes – an alarming stat given the Hoyas’ veteran backcourt.

An already big matchup against No. 5 Pittsburgh on Wednesday now looms even larger. The Hoyas and Panthers will tip off at 7 p.m. from Verizon Center with Georgetown looking to avoid a deflating 1-4 start to its Big East season.

“A good thing is we’re four games into an 18-game season,” Thompson said. “The bad news is that we’ve lost three of those four games, and so this is the Big East – no game gets any easier. The next opponent, if you don’t do what you’re supposed to do, it’s difficult. So does that put a heightened sense of urgency on the Pittsburgh game? Absolutely.”