Jackson Perry
On January 17, the Georgetown men’s basketball suffered a demoralizing loss to a top-5 team on the road, just before an unrelenting stretch of four tough games in two weeks.
After last Sunday’s loss to Villanova, that would be an apt description for the current season’s squad—just as easily as January 2009, when the Hoyas lost to Duke before dropping their next four games.
Beginning last night at Pittsburgh, the Hoyas play three of four games against top-10 opponents, with a rest coming against Rutgers.
“We have a stretch where we have a game and then two days, a game and then two days, a game and then two days—that’s the nature of Big East basketball,” Head Coach John Thompson III said before his team started the current gauntlet against Seton Hall last Thursday. “We have a few very short turnaround situations coming up right now.”
Those situations will test the endurance of Georgetown’s overworked starters—the Hoyas rank fourth-to-last in bench minutes among Division I teams. Thompson doesn’t think it will be an issue.
“There’s been an understanding, at least internally, from the beginning that they were going to play big minutes,” Thompson said. “Conventional wisdom would say, ‘Oh, they’re going to break down’…[but] I don’t know that there is a risk. They’re young, they can play all day.”
Still, if there was a time for Georgetown’s short bench to be tested, it’s now. After the transfer of Nikita Mescheriakov in December, Thompson has just four scholarship players in reserve, all of whom remain enigmatic.
Before the season started, conventional wisdom pegged freshman forward Hollis Thompson, who spent last spring practicing with the team after enrolling early, as the surest thing off the bench. And while he has garnered the majority of the bench minutes and even earned Big East Rookie of the Week honors in November, Thompson’s shooting touch hasn’t been apparent in conference play.
His low point came last weekend against Villanova, when he went 0-for-7 from the field, including 0-for-5 from three-point range. Still, opponents know it is only a matter of time until Thompson starts connecting.
“Hollis Thompson, you know he can score,” Villanova Head Coach Jay Wright said. “With Chris Wright, Monroe, Freeman, and Clark you know they’ve got four big time scorers, I think Hollis Thompson is the next guy that’s capable.”
While Thompson may have taken a step back in Big East play, fellow freshman Jerrelle Benimon has begun to establish himself as an important contributor. The 6-foot-7 forward is undersized for the Big East, but makes up for it with strength and tenacity on the boards.
“Jerrelle is super strong, he’s very, very physical. He’s probably the strongest on the team, I think,” junior forward Julian Vaughn said. “He’s young, so he’s going to make mistakes and stuff, but he knows how to play hard and he knows what he’s supposed to do out there. He doesn’t get rattled or get nervous.”
Benimon hasn’t displayed superstar potential, but he has proven to be an able body capable of pulling down rebounds and making hustle plays—exactly what Coach Thompson needs from his supporting cast.
Still, it would not hurt for the Hoyas to get a few more points from the bench, an area in which it has been sorely lacking. That was certainly the case against Villanova, when starters Wright and Vaughn were limited by foul trouble. The Wildcats won by five, but their bench outscored the Hoyas 25-4.
For now, Coach Thompson isn’t worried.
“It’s an issue if the people that are coming in aren’t producing,” Coach Thompson said. “It’s an issue if all of a sudden there’s a tremendous drop-off from the guys in foul trouble, but the guys that have been coming in have been giving us terrific minutes, and I don’t anticipate if we were to have foul trouble in the future that is an issue.”
