The Hoyas’ final non conference game of the regular season is hardly a break from the tough Big East.At the midway point of the conference schedule, No. 7 Georgetown will welcome No. 8 Duke to a sold-out Verizon Center for a nationally televised battle.

The Blue Devils will be the Hoyas’ fourth top-10 opponent in the past five games, yet the players say they will treat it like any other contest.

“I think it’s just another game,” sophomore guard Jason Clark said Thursday afternoon. “People hype it up to be what it is, but I think it’s just another game to go up against another good team. We have a chance to go out and show how good the Big East is, and they get to show how good the ACC is.”

Head Coach John Thompson III went even further, saying that, while Duke is an important game that everyone is excited for, it is not as important as a Big East contest.

With nine games played and nine to go in the conference, Georgetown is in fifth place at 6-3, with wins over then-No. 13 Connecticut and then-No. 9 Pittsburgh. Two of the three conference losses came on the road to top-five teams in Villanova and Syracuse, both of which Georgetown will play at home in the second half of the season.

Overall, the Hoyas are sixth in the RPI as of Thursday afternoon and are 5-2 against teams in the RPI top 50.

“I like the way the guys are working together,” Thompson said when asked to evaluate his team’s development up to this point. “I like the way we’re trying to get better and have gotten better in many areas. That being said, we still have to continue to get better in a lot of areas.”

A year after the Big East was heralded as the best conference in the history of college basketball – it garnered three No. 1 seeds in the NCAA tournament and sent two teams to the Final Four – the conference is once again a minefield of difficult opponents.

This week, the Big East holds four spots in the AP top 10 and has six teams in the top 20. Georgetown has already played four conference teams that were ranked in the top 15, and there are three current top-10 opponents left on the Hoyas’ Big East schedule.

Despite the brutal gauntlet, the players have echoed their coach’s sentiment – there is always room for improvement.

“We could have done better. Some of the games we could have won,” said junior guard Austin Freeman, who is averaging 19.2 points per game in Big East play. “I’m still happy with where we’re at, but we can always do better.”

The key to the Hoyas’ success up to this point has been their unselfish play on offense. All five starters have led the team in scoring in a game at least once this season, and three players have scored over 25 points in separate Big East games.

“We just need to keep sharing the game, and whenever a person is hot, look for him,” Freeman said.

Junior forward Julian Vaughn, a first-year starter who has increased his scoring average by more than six points per game and is the team’s second-leading rebounder, said he is pleased with where the team is midway through the Big East schedule.

“We definitely have learned a lot about our team,” Vaughn said. “We stick together. We’ve got a good chemistry. We can push through adversity, and we’re not going to quit when we’re down. Obviously we have some things we need to work on, like execution and patience.”

Vaughn’s frontcourt mate, sophomore center Greg Monroe, highlighted execution and discipline on offense as areas for improvement.

“If you’re not perfect, then execution is something you can always get better at,” said Monroe, who is averaging a double-double this season with 14.8 points per game and 10.1 rebounds per game. “When we stay with the offense for long periods of time in the shot clock, we get a lot of good shots or open looks and easy buckets.”

On the other end of the floor, Georgetown’s defense is holding opponents to 62 points per game, good for third in the Big East. Still, the players see room for improvement.

“The biggest area [to improve] is our communication,” Clark said. “Because we’re a very good defensive team, if we communicate with each other the whole game, I think we’ll be able to stop anybody in the country.”

For now – midway through the brutal Big East season – the Hoyas are content with where they are. Looking forward, they agree that there is plenty left to accomplish.

“You can’t get too high on a win or too low on a loss. The goal isn’t to go undefeated,” Vaughn said. “The goal is to keep getting better as the season goes on, and then in March to be clicking on all cylinders. And then we’ll see what happens in the tournament. Right now I’m not too worried about it. We’re pretty confident with where we are.”