Rewind to March 31, 1984. The city is Seattle, Washington. It’s halftime of a very important basketball game. A Final Four game. And we are losing. Yes—we, as in the Georgetown Hoyas Men’s Basketball team—trail the Kentucky Wildcats by a score of 29-22. Patrick Ewing hangs his head in the locker room, lamenting first-half foul trouble. (Big) John Thompson wipes sweat from his brow with that white towel he always drapes over his shoulder. This was supposed to be our year.
The players return from the intermission, and the game resumes its course. Kentucky’s lead diminishes, then disappears. Georgetown pulls away, advances to the championship game, claims its only NCAA Men’s Basketball title in school history. And who led the charge? It had to be Ewing, right? Dave Wingate? Reggie Williams? Hardly. No one set any records that day. No sublime scoring outburst. In fact, the opposite occurred. The story was defense. Defense: the word upon which Thompson built the program, the reputation that preceded his teams. Kentucky scored just eleven points on 3-33 shooting from the field in the second half. The numbers on their side of the scoreboard didn’t change until nearly ten minutes had been played. That game represented, perhaps, the greatest defensive performance in college basketball history, considering the stakes. It provided a blueprint for Hoya basketball under the elder Thompson. That game—a microcosm of a season that started with an emphasis on protecting the basket that ended with a championship banner—cemented defense as the cornerstone of the program.
Fast forward. January 28, 2010. The Hoyas have reclaimed a top-ten AP ranking after a year of absence from the poll’s upper echelon. Many expected this team to improve upon last year’s disappointing season, which saw a talent-loaded squad fail to qualify for the NCAA tournament. But few expected them to improve so rapidly. There are multiple explanations for the team’s unexpected success: a dearth of talent across the country after a top-heavy 2009 season that saw many programs lose players to the NBA Draft and graduation; better team harmony with the departure of DaJuan Summers and Jessie Sapp; a new offensive philosophy that encourages fast-breaks and better utilizes the talents of our various All-American recruits. But more than anything, it has been a case of those players embracing the defensive legacy championed by the former Thompson.
Georgetown’s defensive statistics have improved across the board: opponents are scoring fewer points and shooting a lower field goal percentage than last year. Most notably, the rebounding woes that plagued last year’s squad have been righted. After being out-rebounded in 2009, the team has averaged 4.2 more boards a game than its opponents this season. This reflects the precepts of a defense that works inside-out, ala the elite teams of Ewing and Big John. Julian Vaughn and Greg Monroe have become the most feared interior duo in the Big East, swatting away shots at a clip of five per game while improving their nightly averages in nearly every statistical category. Despite a loss earlier this week to fourth-ranked Syracuse—a game in which the offense was admittedly anemic—a renewed commitment to defense is once again the winning pedigree for the Hoyas. It always has been, always will be. If the players accept this identity—and it often looks like they already have—perhaps they can recapture the swagger and success of that Ewing-led team of a quarter-century ago.
