For all its success this season, No. 17 Georgetown (19-5, 7-3 Big East) has been far from flawless. Luckily for the Lady Hoyas, perfection was not required Saturday afternoon.

Georgetown bounced back from a seven-minute scoreless stretch on its home court, sending visiting Cincinnati (8-14, 1-9 Big East) to its eighth straight loss, 55-38. Junior point guard Rubylee Wright had one of her best games of the season, nailing four three-pointers en route to a 14-point, eight-assist outing.

“I was open,” Wright said. “They [weren’t] guarding me.”

The Blue and Gray (and Pink, as they were decked out in their breast-cancer awareness gear) seized control early on, scoring two quick baskets off turnovers to open the game.

“Coach is always telling us to pressure the ball and we’re going to get layups, we’re going to get open shots,” Wright said. “So that was our main goal tonight, just to pressure the ball.”

The Lady Hoyas’ frenetic zone press disrupted the visitors’ offense even when it didn’t force turnovers; the Bearcats often spent so much time avoiding full-court ball pressure that they started their offense with less than 10 seconds left on the shot clock.

But Cincinnati adjusted to the pressure as the first half progressed, spreading out its offense and swinging the ball around the perimeter to find open shots.

“We didn’t pressure like we can pressure for 40 minutes. We picked and chose when we went hard,” Wright said. “Our team’s crazy.”

The Bearcats employed an all-out denial defense on Georgetown sophomore guard Sugar Rodgers. Junior guard Bjonee Reaves shadowed the star guard for most of the game, holding her scoreless from the 19:14 mark of the first half to the 2:10 mark of the second.

“Sugar is too good of a player to let anyone take her out of the game,” Head Coach Terri Williams-Flournoy said. “She didn’t make as strong cuts as she could’ve — I thought even when they were face-guarding her, she still got open, and she could’ve attacked the basket.”

Rodgers finished 3-of-12 from the field for nine points, and the Lady Hoyas often looked confused and sloppy with her out of the offensive picture. They jacked up 30 three-pointers during the game, sinking only nine.

“Thirty’s too many. I thought a lot of times we probably should’ve [taken] the ball to the basket a little bit more,” Williams-Flournoy said.

Their poor shot selection late in the first half led to a seven-minute scoring drought, during which Cincinnati steadily whittled away at the Georgetown lead. Bearcat senior guard-forward Shelly Bellman’s trey early in the second frame shrank the once-11-point deficit to two.

But in spite of their offensive struggles, the Blue and Gray held strong on defense through most of the game. Shorthanded Cincinnati, which only dressed seven players, seemed to grow increasingly tired in the face of Georgetown’s trapping zone as the afternoon wore on. Reaves, the starting Cincinnati point guard, finished with eight turnovers and only three assists.

“I thought [the defense] was okay. I didn’t know we actually turned them over 20 times,” Williams-Flournoy said. “But I thought at some points, we could have been a little bit more aggressive defensively. I thought sometimes we could’ve went and trapped, but we faded back into our zone.”

It took a little while, but the Lady Hoyas finally proved in the second half that they were capable of functioning without Rodgers’ scoring. Spurred by big baskets from Wright and the junior post tandem of Adria Crawford and Tommacina McBride, the Blue and Gray were able to do just enough to keep the visitors at bay.

Back in their rhythm, the Lady Hoyas converted several Bearcat turnovers into easy buckets and used an 18-3 run to seal the game.

“That’s what we’re doing better as a team,” Wright said. “When one of our shooters is not on, or somebody’s in a slump, somebody else will step up.”

For the Blue and Gray, the sloppy victory came with a silver lining. They turned the ball over only nine times and won the rebounding battle, despite consistently struggling in both categories all season.

“That should be the headline — ‘Georgetown only turns it over nine times,'” Williams-Flournoy said.

But while the win was encouraging in many ways — the Georgetown supporting cast took care of the ball, boxed out and scored enough to make up for Rodgers’ off night — Williams-Flournoy was still disappointed by her star’s performance.

“Sugar took the night off tonight,” Williams-Flournoy said. “We’ve had enough games where she’s decided, ‘I don’t know, I just don’t feel like playing tonight,’ and other people have stepped in to help us get the win. As you’ve seen, when she does decide to play it’s a whole different story.”