The Georgetown men’s basketball team captured its eighth straight conference win last Monday with a 71-53 rout of the West Virginia Mountaineers. Red-hot shooting and stifling defense were the keys to the Hoya victory, which brought the current winning streak to its longest conference run since the 1988-1989 season.
The infamous Mountaineer Nation showed up in force to support their team, hot off an upset victory of no. two-ranked UCLA, but they saw their first and only lead of the night slip away with just a minute gone as junior guard Jonathan Wallace converted a three-point shot to bring the score to 3-2. From that point on, the Hoyas were able to do as they pleased on both sides of the court, shooting a gaudy 79 percent from the floor in the first half while holding the Mountaineers to under 30 percent.
“That was one impressive Georgetown team,” West Virginia Coach John Beilein said of the Hoyas after the game. “Our kids tried really hard tonight, but we just weren’t on the same level.”
With the game just five minutes old and the margin just one point, a block from junior center Roy Hibbert set up an offensive set in which each player touched the ball at least once, culminating in an assist from junior forward Jeff Green to a cutting Wallace for an easy two before the shot clock expired. This possession—textbook Princeton offense—marked the beginning of a 15-0 run that the Mountaineers would never overcome.
West Virginia, a team that leads the league in three-pointers per game and truly lives and dies by perimeter shooting, was only able to convert four in the first half for an abysmal 27 percent. But it wasn’t simply an off-night for West Virginia shooters; Georgetown switched off on every perimeter screen, keeping constant pressure on shooters and contesting every shot.
“They are a great defensive team,” Beilein said. “They switched every screen, and we have only seen that one other time this year. By the time we made an adjustment in the second half, it wasn’t even a ballgame.”
Georgetown entered the locker room with a comfortable 37-20 lead.
The second half began with more of the same, as Wallace hit a cutting Green for the reverse dunk, and the Hoya defense forced a shot-clock violation at the other end of the court. Every time the Mountaineers appeared poised to make a run, Georgetown answered—West Virginia was able to score consecutive unanswered field goals only three times.
“We wear teams down,” Green said after the game. “We work the shot-clock down and either score or get the ball back off a rebound.”
The rebounding margin was as one-sided as the shooting percentage, as the Hoyas dominated the defensive and offensive glass with 35 boards to the Mountaineers’ 19. Georgetown coasted through a second half that was never close, and the final buzzer sang a decisive 71-53 win.
“This was a segment of our schedule that scared me at the beginning of the year,” Coach John Thompson III said. “Louisville, Marquette, and West Virginia all in a row, it’s tough.”
As intimidating as the stretch may have looked, the Hoyas appeared anything but scared, winning all three games by an average of 16 points. A major theme recurring in these past three victories is the increasingly dominant play of standout juniors Jeff Green and Roy Hibbert. Green scored 15 points in Monday night’s game while Hibbert tallied a game-high 20.
“It’s about trust and communication with us,” Hibbert said of his teammate. “[When we switched screens] I would be guarding a smaller, quicker guy, but I always know Jeff is behind me for the block if I get beat.”
The eight-game streak places the Hoyas a half-game behind conference-leading Pittsburgh after the Panthers’ loss to Louisville on Monday. Pitt will visit the Verizon Center on Feb. 24 for what has already been pegged as the major Big East matchup, but Georgetown will look to continue its winning ways on Saturday by avenging an earlier home court loss to Villanova.
The Hoyas seem to have hit a new gear down the stretch of the regular season, but their recent success isn’t good enough for Jeff Green and company.
“We played well, but we can be much, much better,” he said.
