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Tuesday, February 27, 2007

Hoyas Lose to Syracuse

I can't say I'm that upset that we lost. I don't think that we should ever settle for failure, but if we were going to lose a game, this seemed like the one. We talked about it yesterday. We were coming off a big win, going on the road with little rest, and walking into a building with 30,000 screaming Orange fans on Senior Night for a team that still needed a big win to solidify their tournament resume. It was an uphill battle.


That being said, I'm very upset with the way we lost. I thought an "L" was a possibility, but I expected it to be a close game. It wasn't. The ‘Cuse killed the Hoyas. That's not the way a contender should perform. This is the third or fourth game in a row where Georgetown offensive performance has been relatively lackluster. The Hoyas' shot a horrendous 29.8% from the field (17 for 57). This was also the third time in four games where Roy Hibbert was a complete non-factor offensively (He scored 6 points—he scored a similarly miniscule 7 and 4 points against Cinci and Nova respectively). But the real difference in this game was poor defense. This was only the third time that Georgetown has let an opponent score 70 or more points this season. And it's the first time that Georgetown has let an opponent score that many points in 25 games! The previous two incidents were Georgetown's 86-70 win over Vandy and the 62-75 debacle involving ODU.

The question becomes how will the Hoyas respond? A lot of programs hit a wall this time of year. Will Georgetown take this loss, learn from it, and then move on as a stronger team? Or is this the beginning of a slide back into mediocrity? Time will surely tell.

1 comment:

IPB said...

We looked totally awful. I give the entire team--from the coaches on down--an "F" for all aspects of play last night. There was not one player who played well. Period. Putting aside the open looks we missed, we committed way too many turnovers, committed dumb fouls at key moments, played uninspired defense, did not adjust well to the Syracuse 2-3 zone, and once again had trouble guarding the 3 pt line (some of the 3 point makes Syracuse converted were sick but many were also wide-open). I could go on and on but will not.

As poorly as we played (I would clearly rate this as our worst performance on the season), let's take some encouragement in the fact that we actually led by a point with 11 minutes left.

Hopefully this performance was an aberration. As Jester points out, the next few games will surely tell.