Walking off the Verizon Center court to a combination of scattered boos coming from Georgetown fans in the lower bowl and “Let’s go Pitt,” chants raining down from the upper deck, the Hoyas were living testaments to how quickly things can change in college basketball.
“It’s not an ideal situation,” senior point guard Chris Wright said after the Hoyas’ 72-57 loss to Pittsburgh (16-1, 4-0 Big East) Wednesday night. “It’s not a situation that any of us envisioned that we were going to be in, but at this point you can’t do nothing about it. You’ve got to step up and we’ve got to make plays and win games. It’s no time for us to be basically acting like punks. We’ve got to step up.”
Two days before Christmas, Georgetown embarrassed then-No. 17 Memphis on the road to close out its nonconference slate at 11-1, causing some pundits to proclaim that the Hoyas might be the best team in the Big East. Riding high off that eye-catching run, Head Coach John Thompson III’s team cracked the top 10 as it began league play against Notre Dame in South Bend, Ind., and fittingly, in the middle of nowhere, the Hoyas began their current five-game stretch of poor shooting and regressing inside play that seemed to come out of nowhere.
From impressive early season impressions to their current slide that brings back memories of the 2008-2009 season, the Hoyas (12-5, 1-4 Big East) have seen the tides change quickly. Their loss to the Panthers, a clear Final Four-caliber team, was not a surprise and would not have been under other circumstances. Unlike sluggish outings against DePaul, St. John’s and West Virginia, Georgetown played with noticeably improved energy and got many of the looks it wanted offensively. But its stars missed shots, its role players missed shots and its team defense was still not at the level Thompson prefers.
“We have to do a better job of getting to our second, third, fourth options possibly,” Thompson said of his team’s offensive reads. “Getting back to the mentality of ‘We just want a good shot,’ whether it’s after three seconds or 33 seconds. They did a good job of defending us, yes, but the stuff we wanted was still there.”
When they were humming like a finely tuned machine in the nonconference, the Hoyas made it look easy. Two excellent shooters — senior guard Austin Freeman and junior guard Jason Clark — and two above average shooters — Wright and sophomore forward Hollis Thompson — were so good from downtown that it seemed impossible that all four would go cold at the same time — but that is exactly what has happened. In five Big East games so far, Georgetown is 22-of-90, or a chilly 24.4 percent, from three-point range.
While the Hoyas’ prolonged shooting slump continued against Pittsburgh, they showed vast improvement in two areas that had been costing them dearly: taking care of the basketball and team rebounding. Turnovers have been a recurring problem for Georgetown all season long and the frontcourt had been getting dominated on the glass lately, but on Wednesday night the Hoyas committed just nine turnovers and outrebounded the Panthers on the offensive boards 11-9.
Even after addressing those self-inflicted problems, the Hoyas still trailed by as many as 22 and lost by 15, making the loss a simple product of the two main aspects of the sport: shooting and defense.
With 13 games still to play, the Hoyas are headed for a two-game New Jersey road trip against Rutgers and Seton Hall, mired in an old-fashioned slump and sparking questions about their confidence and whether this Freeman-Wright-led group is just getting started on another long, head-scratching winter swoon.
Tip-off at the RAC in New Brunswick, N.J., is set for noon tomorrow.
