Connecticut Coach Jim Calhoun watched the film of Georgetown's upset of 16th-ranked Pittsburgh for three hours and came away impressed with the young Hoyas. After watching his 10th-ranked Huskies hold off Georgetown, 66-59, in front of 11,363 at MCI Center yesterday afternoon, he was even more impressed.
"Georgetown is back, I can tell you that," Calhoun said. "Whether they have a couple of bumps in the road with youth and stuff, that's fine. . . . This team can beat anybody in the league. They're young, but they're getting better."
The Hoyas' Darrel Owens lifts a pass over the Huskies' Denham Brown as Brandon Bowman catches up on the right.
(John Mcdonnell -- The Washington Post)
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But on the sixth anniversary of John Thompson Jr.'s resignation as the Hoyas' coach, the son of the man who built Georgetown into a national power preached caution.
"We're two games into the league," first-year Georgetown coach John Thompson III said. "We've won one and lost one. You don't start taking stock of where you are in the middle of the season. We have a lot of games left to play."
U-Conn. has had a great deal of success against the Hoyas recently; over the last 12 seasons, the Huskies have won 15 of 17 meetings, including the past eight. But the defending national champion came to Washington with a sense of urgency. Calhoun joked that the Huskies had been together 24 hours a day since their 75-70 home loss to No. 25 Boston College on Wednesday night, and he ran them through a 3 1/2-hour practice the other day.
The Huskies led by as many as 22 points early in the second half, but Georgetown battled back. Neither team shot particularly well (38.2 percent for U-Conn., 37.5 percent for Georgetown), but the Huskies held a huge rebounding advantage (47-32, and 17-7 on the offensive side).
Freshman forward Jeff Green (Northwestern) was 8 of 11 from the field for a game-high 22 points; he added six rebounds and three assists for the Hoyas (9-4, 1-1). Sophomore forward Charlie Villanueva had 19 points and 13 rebounds to lead the Huskies (9-2, 1-1). Freshman forward Rudy Gay (Archbishop Spalding), the Big East preseason rookie of the year, scored only three points on 1-of-6 shooting for U-Conn.
"It's remarkable to me what John's done," Calhoun said. "That offense takes two to three years [to master] and it takes, to some degree, taking everything instinctively that these kids have poorly learned and apply that to team basketball. He should be saluted."
Thompson was not happy with the way the Hoyas played, particularly on offense, in the first half. Georgetown missed nine of its first 10 shots and fell behind, 15-4, eight minutes into the game. But that didn't bother Thompson as much as what happened over the final five minutes of the first half, when U-Conn. went on a 14-2 closing run that gave it a 39-19 lead at the break.
"Early on, in the first five, six, seven, 10 minutes, I felt that we ran our stuff and got looks, but the ball didn't go in," said Thompson, whose team shot 25 percent from the field and 18.2 percent from beyond the three-point arc in the first half. "After that, we were just out there -- execution disappeared. . . . There was not too much about that first half that was Georgetown basketball."
"We went into halftime, and Coach Thompson gave us a talk about running our offense," said senior Darrel Owens, who had four assists and five points. "I think you saw in the first half, a lot of guys took it upon themselves to try to make big plays. With the style of offense we play, the ball has to be distributed to everybody within the offense. . . . We kind of got out of sync."
The Hoyas made their first three attempts from three-point range to spark a 22-8 run to open the second half.
Green's three-pointer from the left side as the shot-clock buzzer sounded brought Georgetown to within six, 47-41, with 9 minutes 34 seconds left. But the Hoyas never got closer. Reserve forward Denham Brown seemed to come up with a big basket for U-Conn. every time Georgetown made a run; Brown finished with 19 points, 15 above his season average.
Georgetown outscored (40-27) and outrebounded (17-15) the Huskies in the second half. The Hoyas shot 50 percent from the field, and 13 of their 14 field goals came off of an assist. But the second-half progress wasn't enough to satisfy Georgetown.
"We can have success, but it's not success at the end of the day because there's an 'L,' " Owens said. "No matter what we did right, what we did wrong, we want to know who won or who lost. There are no moral victories. We can beat this team, we thought we could've beaten this team, but they're a great team and they won."
