Teams

Georgetown:
A win for the Hoyas was absolutely mandatory to keep themselves relevant for this season. They worked hard to open a slight cushion in the second half, but relaxed a little bit and paid for it. The team needs to develop a stronger ability to finish off games when possible. They did close out the game in the final minutes, but they could have finished it off about eight minutes earlier. Similar lapses will be costly against better teams than St. John’s.

St. John’s:
Once again, the Red Storm gave the Hoyas all kinds of problems. St. John’s has struggled for the past few seasons, so they are used to playing from behind. In fact, they didn’t start executing in their half court offense until they faced their biggest deficit of the second half, at which point they erupted for ten straight points. The team has a few pretty dangerous players and as a whole looks like they will be much tougher than the preseason rankings indicate.

Players

Georgetown:
The Hoyas are developing their own Big Three, and those guys – Monroe, Wright, and Freeman – carried the load of the scoring. Wright was hot in the first half, Monroe and Freeman did most of their damage in the second half. Even though they didn’t score much, Julian Vaughn and Jason Clark made key plays in crunch time.

St. John’s:
Dwight Hardy and Justin Brownlee were impact players off the bench in the second half. Brownlee had a team high 10 second half points, and Hardy scored nine points on three three-pointers. Hardy shot 3 for 7 from beyond the arc in the second half, but amazingly only made shots when he had defenders all over him.

Fans

Hoya Nation represented well for an 8 PM start on New Year’s Eve, but the atmosphere was below average. With most of the students still being away from campus, there were noticeable periods of extended quiet. The Hoyas needed big defensive stops down the stretch, but it sounded like St. John’s was running their offense in a library. Timing is everything and the timing of this game made the typical raucous crowd impossible.

Number of the Game

0: The number of points scored by Georgetown’s bench. The Hoya subs were outscored by the St. John’s subs 33-0. We at Hoya Hoops are in the process of learning if this is the first time in the modern era (since 1972) that the Hoyas have come up empty on bench production. Stay tuned.

The Final Word

The Washington Times will be shutting down their sports department next month, which means that Barker Davis, the excellent reporter/writer who has covered the Hoyas for over a decade, will no longer be doing so. The internet has done to the newspaper industry what the automobile did to the horse and buggy industry. Don’t worry about Barker, he’s a pro and he will land on his feet. You may instead want to worry about finding somebody from another news outlet who takes the Hoyas as seriously as Mr. Davis. You might never find them.