CHESTNUT HILL, Mass., Jan. 29 -- It started so innocently, with a missed three-pointer here, a missed pull-up jump shot there. But minute after minute passed, and the Georgetown men's basketball team kept missing shots. The Hoyas went scoreless from the field for a 15-minute stretch in the first half against eighth-ranked Boston College on Saturday night, and any chance at an upset ended there.
That kind of hole is difficult to dig out of against any team, and particularly against a veteran team that had yet to lose a game and that was playing in front of an excited sellout crowd of 8,606 at Conte Forum. The Eagles won, 64-49.
Craig Smith sees the ball through during first-half action. Boston College improved to 18-0 and took over first place in the Big East standings.
(Steven Senne -- AP)
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Boston College is 18-0, extending its best start. The Eagles (7-0 Big East) moved into sole possession of first place in the conference, after No. 4 Syracuse lost to Pittsburgh. Georgetown fell to 13-6, 5-3.
Boston College junior Craig Smith, the undersized yet powerful forward who always seems to cause problems for Georgetown, had a game-high 20 points and eight rebounds. Forward Jared Dudley, who was averaging 21 points in conference play, scored 13 on 4-of-8 shooting.
Junior Brandon Bowman scored 16 points for Georgetown, and freshman guard Tyler Crawford was the only other Hoya to break double digits in scoring. He sparked Georgetown off the bench with his energy and finished with 12 points and six rebounds (four offensive) in 16 minutes.
The Hoyas did nearly everything better in the second half than they did in the first half, and they managed to pull within five points. But Georgetown Coach John Thompson III wasn't satisfied with that.
"We've done that all year, so I didn't learn anything," Thompson said. "Our guys, if they learned anything, they learned they need to come and play from the beginning."
Georgetown looked completely out of sync for the first 15 minutes of the game. The Hoyas committed 14 first-half turnovers (more than their game average of 13.4), nine between freshman post players Jeff Green and Roy Hibbert, the linchpins of the motion offense. They shot only 26.3 percent (5 for 19).
"I think it was more of us not doing what we needed to do on offense the first half," Bowman said. "We let ourselves get out of motion in the first half. The defensive pressure I don't think played as big a part as our own willingness to run the plays. We got out of sync for the most part in the first half. We tried to correct that and come out in the second half and cut harder and faster and lessen the turnovers."
Junior Ashanti Cook took and made the Hoyas' first shot, a three-pointer from the right corner 42 seconds into the game. But over the next 15 minutes, Georgetown missed 15 shots. Its only point came on a Hibbert free throw with 16 minutes 48 seconds left in the half, and Boston College built an 18-4 lead.
Hibbert finally ended the Hoyas' drought with a dunk with 4:05 left in the half, but even that was hard-earned; it was the fourth shot of the possession. Georgetown -- somewhat remarkably -- made its final three shots of the half (all off of drives), and went into halftime trailing 24-12.
"The points we did get, we stumbled into them," Thompson said. "They didn't come off of our offense. As much as [Boston College is] a veteran team and as much as they are so poised at the offensive end, the same thing happens at the defensive end."
The Hoyas climbed back into the game, not by shooting from outside but by moving the ball and getting easy baskets off of backdoor cuts. At one point midway through the half, Georgetown scored three straight baskets off of backdoor layups set up by Green, who had six assists and no turnovers in the final 20 minutes.
Cook made an open three-pointer from the right corner with 8:30 remaining, and that brought Georgetown to within 40-35. But the Hoyas could get no closer than that, as the Eagles made smart plays and big shots down the stretch. With less than three minutes left in the game, Smith passed up a three-point attempt as the shot clock was winding down to kick the ball to Louis Hinnant (Gwynn Park). Hinnant's three-pointer as the shot-clock buzzer sounded was a dagger that put Boston College up 55-41 with 2:51 to play.
"It seemed like the first half, we were lackadaisical. The second half, we came out and realized what we needed to do, cutting harder and playing harder," Bowman said. "We were more assertive in the second half, more than the first half when we were just out there going through the motions."
