Two teams. Two different directions. And the Hoyas are not the ones moving in the right one.
Reeling after their second-straight poor performance and loss, No. 17 Georgetown (17-6, 8-4 Big East) hardly has any time to sit back and reflect. Instead, it has just over 60 hours to right the ship as it heads to No. 4 Villanova (20-2, 10-1) Sunday afternoon.
After Thursday night’s tough 57-51 loss at Marquette (17-8, 7-5), Georgetown has dropped two straight in depressing fashion. Both last night and in their previous loss, Sunday against West Virginia at MCI Center, the Hoyas took early leads before going cold and relinquishing their spot atop the scoreboard. Both losses came against good teams, but they were also avoidable.
Sophomore forward Jeff Green, who has shown a knack for stepping up against good teams – he had 22 in the recent loss to WVU, 18 in the win against Duke and 17 in GU’s first loss to WVU – had his worst game of the season yesterday, scoring just two points and turning the ball over eight times.
No one else stepped up in place of Green, save for sophomore center Roy Hibbert, who notched 18 points and eight rebounds in a clutch post performance. Still, his resurgence – he has 23 points over the course of GU’s last four games against ranked opponents – was not enough to stop Marquette senior forward Steve Novak or freshman guard Dominic James.
Villanova, on the other hand, is coming off of a regular season win big enough to earn a seven-year contract extension for Head Coach Jay Wright. On Monday night, No. 4 Villanova downed No. 1 Connecticut (22-2, 9-2), 69-64. Just the next day, the Wildcats extended Head Coach Jay Wright’s contract through 2013.
Villanova was led to victory by senior guard Allan Ray, who shot 7-for-9 from behind the three-point arch and finished with 25 points. Nineteen of them came in a second half in which the Wildcats outscored the Huskies, 36-32 and made 7-of-9 three-pointers. Sophomore guard Kyle Lowery added 18 points and senior guard Randy Foye had 10 of his own.
Indeed, ‘Nova’s guard-dominated scoring against the nation’s best was a microcosm of its entire season. The Wildcats typically start four guards – and at the very least three – and have guards as their top four scorers. Foye leads the squad in scoring at 20 points per game, and at 6-foot-4 is the tallest of their guards.
In addition to the 6-foot-2 Ray (18.9 points per game) and 6-foot-1 Lowery (11.5 points), 6-foot-2 junior Mike Nardi rounds out their cabal of guards, and averages 11.7 per contest. All four average over 28 minutes per game, and on the year, the guards account for 79 percent of the team’s scoring. Though their guard-heavy lineup does leave them with a height disadvantage against most opponents, their quickness makes Villanova an extremely tough team to defend.
The Wildcats’ front court presence is represented by junior forward Will Sheridan, senior forward Jason Fraser, and freshman forward Dante Cunningham. Sheridan, who at 6-foot-8 is an inch shorter than the other two forwards, is the only of the three to start – he has started all 22 games – but while he leads the team in rebounding at 5.9, he only averages 4.9 points. Fraser is second among the forwards in scoring at 4.2 per game. From the backcourt, Foye chips in five boards per contest.
Despite the relative lack of frontcourt fire power, Villanova still manages to outrebound most opponents, albeit barely. On the season, they average 35.3 rebounds per game, while their opponents grab one less. Against the Huskies, the Big East’s best rebounding team, the Wildcats were outdone on the glass 41-34. Georgetown and Connecticut were even on the glass in their Jan. 14 match up at Storrs, each grabbing 28 rebounds.
What makes Villanova so tough is not that it does one thing incredibly well – their 43.5 percent shooting from the field pales in comparison to Georgetown’s 48 percent (through Wednesday night), they only best the Hoyas 39.4 percent to 37 percent from beyond the arch, and they are tenth in the Big East in assists – but rather that their offense is extremely versatile and unconventional.
The four-man backcourt either forces opponents to play smaller, quicker guards that are unaccustomed to getting big minutes or to clog the lane with big men to keep the Villanova guards from the getting to the basket. Against the bigger teams, the Wildcats have shot the ball well from three, best evidenced by their win over UConn.
With smaller opponents, Villanova tends to use their quickness to either beat their opponents to the basket, or to free themselves for better perimeter shots. Against DePaul, one of the Big East’s weakest and shortest teams, on Feb. 11, Villanova struggled from three but drove to the basket at will. On Jan. 21 against then-No. 20 Syracuse, in an 80-65 win, the Wildcats used their quickness to get to the line 35 times, and they made 32 of those tries.
For Georgetown to be successful against the Wildcats, they will need to return to the basic principles of the Princeton offense that had the Hoyas on such a role following the victory over Duke. Georgetown will need to be more patient with the basketball and work harder to get open looks. No matter how they do it, GU has to improve upon the 40 percent shooting performances it’s demonstrated over their last two contests.
The Hoyas have a decided height advantage against the Wildcats, but it is unclear how they will use it. They could milk Hibbert on the offensive end, but they run the risk of surrendering speed on the defensive end. More likely, they will go with a smaller lineup to match-up better defensively with Villanova, and use Green as their chief frontcourt threat on offense. Still, Hibbert, as up and down as he has been all year, was the only bright spot against arquette. No matter, the bottom line remains that if Georgetown is cold from behind the arch, they stand very little chance of coming away from Philadelphia with a W.
Villanova is climbing. Georgetown is falling. Saturday, at noon in Villanova, Pa., the Hoyas will look to right the ship and remind the nation that they really are back on the map.
