Now everyone can take a deep breath, right? It’s going to be ok, isn’t it?
After a two-game losing streak that had Hoya Nation sliding into depression as their team slid out of the national rankings, Jeff Green and company went out and did what they are expected to do. They put a beating on the crummy James Madison team, 89-53. Calling the game “a beating” might even be an understatement. They destroyed the Dukes. It was a go-home-crying-to-your-mother-
after-you-got-beat-by-10-in-a-game-
to-11-and-you’re-leaving-with-a-
bloody-nose type of game for those poor players clad in purple. Georgetown embarrassed them the way Big John used to toy with out-of-conference opponents. John Thompson III’s boys were up 30 points and still unconsciously bombing away from the Friendship Arch in Chinatown, draining shots more often than not.
This is what they’re supposed to do though, isn’t it? Wasn’t this team a consensus top-10 preseason pick? Didn’t we just see Roy Hibbert and Jon Wallace on the cover of Sports Illustrated? Weren’t these guys telling us before their first game of the season that there was no reason they shouldn’t be the last ones dancing this year? So what happened?
Well, there was the Monarchs’ mastery in McDonough, and then there was the quack attack that caused panic attacks and last Saturday the no-repeat defeat to the Dukies at Cameron Indoor. These games, with no real quality wins interspersed, had the Hoyas feeling paranoia instead of inflicting it.
This team now feels more like an episode of Lost than a team that’s in contention for a nice long-run March. No one knows what to expect anymore. Jeff Green, Wooden Award finalist, member of the Big East’s preseason First Team and all-around good guy, looks like he could score 24 points some nights (like he did last night before it became a blow out; he was pulled after scoring 17) while on other nights he might drop only four. Roy has shown he can swat away two or three shots within two or three seconds—just ask JMU’s center Gabriel Chami. Yet in the loss to Oregon, the Ducks somehow got the seven-footer to play small. Talk about inconsistency. Maybe the boys should take a lesson from Georgetown’s women’s team. They’ve rattled off seven wins in a row.
After Wednesday night’s shellacking, the good news is Jeff Green did not forget how to score. Roy Hibbert will defensively dominate the middle of the paint as long as he is on the floor. Thompson hasn’t tightened the reigns so much on his team’s offense that they fear attacking the rim. We saw that Wednesday, in the form of alley-oop dunks and the back door lay-ups that have been conspicuously sparse for the first part of the season.
These players know that to win games they need to take shots. They know that they can’t sit and stew on offense in the final minutes of a tight game like they did in Durham. They’ve heard everyone and their mother (and probably JT III’s father) telling them to be more aggressive.
So they started to take open shots when they were there, instead of passing until they got that one perfect shot as the shot clock expires, which sometimes never came. And they made them. They made lots of them. A record 16 three-pointers and 32 field goals all together. A promising sign seeing as an open jump shot is an open jump shot whether you’re playing a 2-4 JMU squad or the No. 1 team in the country.
The thing is, they still don’t know what kind of team they are or how far into March they’ll be playing. And as much as we like to sweat and twitch over rankings in December, neither do we.
