This shouldn’t have happened. At this point in the season, our Hoya basketball team should be 11-2 in the Big East, 20-5 overall, dominating the conference and playing for a No. 2 or 3 seed in the NCAA tournament. Instead, we are 6-7 in the Big East and 15-10 overall with no chance of making the Big Dance aside from a shocking victory in the Big East Tournament in two weeks. The five games that should have been wins all occurred in the conference and were all lost by the Hoyas either in overtime or by one point.
In the first game, an overtime loss at Rutgers, the Hoyas held leads of 18 in the first half, nine with five minutes left in the second and five early in the overtime period. Each time they allowed a then-weak Rutgers team to climb back in the game. The second, a one-point loss to Pittsburgh, featured a remarkable 17-point Hoya comeback in the second half, but Georgetown allowed a 6-foot-4 guard to get an offensive put-back to place the Panthers up by one at the end. In the third game, a four-overtime epic against Notre Dame, the Hoyas had chances to win the game on four separate occasions, at the end of regulation and every overtime except for the last one. Last Saturday against Villanova, the Hoyas had another second-half comeback, but with 2.5 second left allowed Wildcat guard Derrick Snowden to go coast to coast unmolested for a lay-up to send the game to overtime. On Tuesday, the Hoyas led by eight with eight minutes to play against Connecticut and let that lead slip away. Trailing by one with 38 seconds left, the Hoyas did not foul a weak-foul shooting UConn team, failed to call a timeout after the missed Connecticut shot and then could not even get off a shot.
It’s not as if the Hoyas didn’t have the talent to win any of these games. This season Georgetown dominated quality opponents such as Notre Dame, Syracuse and Boston College. In each of these games, it was clear who the more talented team was. Moreover, the Hoyas have the most talented and hardest working player in the Big East in sophomore power forward Mike Sweetney. Sweetney is third in the Big East in scoring, rebounding and field goal percentage, averaging 19.9 points, 9.9 rebounds and is shooting 58 percent. Throughout the season, he has consistently played at a NBA level.
So where does the blame lie? We must point it at coaching and senior leadership. Now don’t get us wrong, we honestly feel that Head Coach Craig Esherick has done an admirable job replacing one of the greatest coaching legends of all time, John Thompson. Also, we think that lone-senior point guard Kevin Braswell has done more positive things for the Georgetown program than any player since Allen Iverson. Still, we must ask why Esherick never calls timeouts when we have a chance to win the game at the end? Recognizing that the defense can set itself up after a timeout, we also know that the current plan of having Braswell frenetically run down the court and hoist up a shot doesn’t work. Also, it strikes us as strange that Braswell never gives Sweetney a sniff of the ball in any clutch situation when it’s clear that the power forward can manhandle anyone in the Big East on the inside.
These are questions we must ponder further when the season ends and we can fully analyze what exactly went wrong. The best we can do now, however is hope for a successful Big East Tournament run. Go Hoyas.
