Despite Big East tournament win, Georgetown remains a mystery

NEW YORK

At times, Georgetown's soft gray uniforms can seem like cloaks of invisibility. The Hoyas have a tendency to evaporate before your eyes; they are a team of baffling lapses and strange vanishings. If they don't find a way to be more fully present, they're liable to disappear from the Big East tournament in the next round.

Who are these guys, anyway? Are they the top 10 team that for a while seemed capable of beating anybody, including Duke and Villanova? Or are they just a second-cut squad that dropped four of their last six games coming into postseason? They are maddeningly indistinct, and they showed both aspects of themselves in a 69-49 victory over South Florida at Madison Square Garden on Wednesday afternoon.

They got in serious foul trouble and let the Bulls -- a team suffering from laughable shooting woes; we're talking clunkers and air balls -- hang around for way too long. Yet they overcame their issues with a high-energy, game-breaking 13-4 run. To Coach John Thompson III's relief, they found some focus. "I thought our guys did a good job of weathering the storm," he said.

It was good enough to advance to the quarterfinals, but will it be enough to fend off top-seeded Syracuse in the next round? Probably not. If a 20-point victory can be foreboding, somehow this one was.

Superficially, the Hoyas have all the pieces: guards who can ripple the nets, as Chris Wright and Jason Clark did with 15 and 16 points, respectively; an imposing and alive inside presence in Greg Monroe (16 points); and an X-factor in Austin Freeman (eight). Yet for all that, they don't seem to have an emotional driver. It's perplexing, with no single explanation. Perhaps it's the result of youth, of having no senior. Or it may be a function of personality: Freeman is their most effective scorer, but his outward demeanor is impassive, almost apathetic. Or it may be that they are an extension of Thompson, with his calculatedly dull persona and emphasis on mechanics and finding the "right" shot.

Whatever the cause, the Hoyas have a habit of wandering mentally. Against the Bulls, their level of intensity came and went like fog. The game got off to an inexplicably slow start -- maybe it was just too hard for college kids to get up before noon. The Bulls never woke up. They couldn't make anything -- they were even lousy from the charity stripe. They missed bunnies, floaters. At one point in the first half they were shooting just 17 percent from the floor and 33 percent on free throws. Watching their numbers dip lower and lower on the scoreboard was like watching mercury falling.

"We really struggled to find a shot," South Florida Coach Stan Heath said. "We couldn't hit a perimeter jump shot."

Yet the Hoyas took only minimal advantage of such a dry spell. For a while it seemed an open question whether they would break 20 themselves. Freeman was entirely scoreless until 53 seconds remained in the half. They finally surged to a 31-19 halftime lead, thanks to Wright, who kept pushing the ball straight to the rim. He scored 10 points before the Bulls did.

The Hoyas' size and discipline had a little something to do with the Bulls' dismal shooting, as Monroe and Julian Vaughn altered some shots inside. But the Hoyas were kidding themselves if they thought their defense was the game's deciding factor. "I don't think it was anything necessarily they did," Heath said. "We just could not make a shot. I can't count to you how many layups and free throws we missed."

In fact, the Hoyas' defense was entirely casual to open the second half, with the result that the Bulls quickly cut Georgetown's lead to six. They left the baseline wide open, and Dominique Jones penetrated at will, scoring or dishing. On two straight possessions he easily found Jarrid Famous, who jammed twice and drew Vaughn's third and fourth fouls, forcing him to the bench. The pair of three-point plays made it 35-29 with 16 minutes 52 seconds left.

Against a team with a hot hand, the Hoyas would have been in real trouble. "I thought we were in great shape," Heath said. "I really felt that was a pivotal time we could make a run."

Instead they went ice cold again. They finished the game shooting 29 percent overall, and were just 1 of 10 from three-point range. "I just feel like we had open shots and missed them," Jones said. "I missed them. Everybody else taking shots missed them. You can't beat a top 25 team and a Big East team without hitting shots. We know that. They just weren't falling."

The Hoyas deserved credit for this much: They showed the outlines of real character when threatened in the second half, outscoring the Bulls 13-4 from 6:33 to the 1:43 mark. They made "big shots when we needed shots," Thompson said. But the bottom line was that they beat a so-so team, one right on the bubble. It will take a far more defining performance to prove they belong in the company of Syracuse. "We have to make shots and guard our guys. You know, let's not make it rocket science," Thompson said. At least that much was clear.