With a match-up against Pittsburgh for Big East supremacy only days away, the Hoyas may have been guilty of looking ahead as they struggled against last-place Cincinnati last night. Despite early struggles, Georgetown rallied and extended their winning streak to ten with a 75-65 win.
In a game that featured teams moving in opposite directions—Georgetown had won their last nine and Cincinnati had lost their last nine—Georgetown looked careless and nonchalant for long stretches of the first half, allowing the more aggressive Bearcats to build an early lead. Cincinnati was dead-on from behind the arc at the start of the game, hitting their first five to pull ahead by ten. Junior guard Jonathan Wallace was able to stem the tide with a ten-point first-half performance. The Hoyas seemed to settle into a groove late in the first half, eventually pulling ahead 37-31 at halftime.
“We started off down big,” Coach John Thompson III said. “We didn’t do a good job of guarding the three-point line. I’m very happy to get the victory, but from here we really need to improve.”
The Bearcats quickly cut the lead to three in the second half, but with ten minutes left, the Hoyas stepped it up on the defensive end and took over the game. Georgetown converted 57 percent of their second half shots, while holding the Bearcats to 33 percent.
Jeff Green, coming off one of his best games of the season against Villanova on Saturday, showed once again why he is one of the premiere players in the nation, scoring a team-high 21 points. Not only did Green lead the team in scoring, he also set the tone defensively. Midway through the second half, with Cincinnati on a fast break, Green raced down the court, blocking the shot from behind and erasing any hopes of the Bearcats making a comeback.
With Hibbert constantly double and sometimes triple-teamed, Georgetown’s balance proved the difference as Wallace stepped up with 17 points and Sapp added 14 of his own.
“They were sitting two or three guys on [Roy Hibbert],” Thompson said. “In hindsight, I probably should have played him less to negate some of the things they were trying to do.”
The win pushed Georgetown’s season-high win streak to ten games, a feat they last achieved in the 2003/2004 season. Ironically this streak started after the Hoyas lost at Pitt on Jan 17. The two teams are now tied atop the Big East Conference with an 11-2 record, and Georgetown will look to avenge their last loss and gain sole possession of first place at the Verizon Center on Saturday.
