John Thompson III was undefeated in Big East Conference openers before last night. When he woke up this morning he found himself at 6-1 with a bullet.
My Thoughts the morning after:
ND came out with a plan and Georgetown cooperated very nicely. What I mean is that the Irish played a sagging defense to take away cuts, specifically of the backdoor variety. So by doing that they gave up three pointers. Georgetown, one of the best three point shooting teams in the country promptly went 3-15 from deep in the first half. I rewatched the game this morning and of those 15 shots, I only counted 3 "bad" shots. They just weren't going in
Julian Vaughn is the team's most important player. Please don't confuse that with being the team's best player. He's not. He is however the one player that can command double team's down low and score on post moves right now. Sims plays the high post well and is a much better passer than Vaughn. So when Julian went out after less than 2 minutes with 2 fouls, trouble was a brewing in the form of a perfect storm of no outside shots or inside shots.
Remember how I said that most of the misses in the first half were good shots? Well midway through the 2nd half, frustration took over and we started to see bad shots. It's one of those things where when things aren't going that well everything sorta snowballs into a nightmare.
I don't like JT3's unwillingness to come out with the lineup that is the best. I really thought Vee should have started the 2nd half. The 4 guard lineup with Sims was the best lineup available at that time. Vee should have taken either Hollis or Clark's minutes last night. I know that Wright was the one that couldn't make a shot but he's really the only point guard on the team and it shows when he is out.
The Hoyas shot 60% from 2 and 18% from 3. They didn't adjust well enough. Clark, Freeman, and Thompson should have been getting better shots closer in near the elbow. Actually now that I say that, Freeman did get a lot of good shots and shot well. We can take him off that list. In fact Clark was 2-8 from 3 and 1-1 from 2. And the 2 that he took was great. It came off of a Sims high post pass. Ok I'm getting bitter again.
The worst part about the night was that the Hoyas played good enough defense to win this game on the road. Yes there were a bunch of timely 2nd or 3rd chance points by the Irish but Georgetown held them to well below their average, especially if you factor out the free throws at the end when they were intentionally foulling, and to a low FG%.
They did lose Abromaitis on a few screens, especially on that one inbounds play. Damn I hate that dude.
They got absolutely killed from the line. ND was 22 for 27 while GU was 5-9. Throw in the 4-22 from behind the line and that is tough to recover from for any team.
There are a lot of "sky is falling" type Hoya fans this morning and that's a bit ridiculous. If you are going to get up and down on this team every 40 minutes at a time, you are going to have one rough ride my man.
The St. John's game on Jan 3rd just got really interesting. I'd call it a must win but that's silly because if they lose, their season isn't over. I'll just call it a really, really important game.
I hope they play ND again in March at MSG. This won't happen again.
Peace brah
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