Story By: Erin Zollars
Photos By: Sol Tucker
Washington, D.C–
In one of the biggest games of the season for the Hoyas today, they answered the call for one half of a game and lasted for quite a bit of the second half, but then just could not find the right scoring combination to stay close late in the game as Syracuse emerged with an 80-68 victory.
The Hoyas were able to close the gap in any of the leads by the Orange and keep it a winnable game down by just 2 to 3 points for a quite a bit of the second half. Then, it was an 11-2 Syracuse run pushed the advantage to eight. It stayed in the 6-10 range for most of the second half. Every time Georgetown would threaten, Syracuse would hit a big shot. JJ Starling and Quadir Copeland provided some timely scoring during this stretch.
“Today’s game was interesting. I told our men whoever was going to defend was going to win, and I don’t think we defended well. Credit Syracuse, they made some tough shots, were able to get to the free throw line, and were able to limit us to 5-of-26 from three. You have to give their defense credit; turnovers continued to hurt us. I think our players’ personalities come out when we can score, so for us to continue to improve we have to hang our hat on defense cause the ball can only be in one basket. It felt like a BIG EAST game, credit coach. We’re going to put this behind us quick. It’s unfortunate that we lost back-to-back home games, but in doing so, we’ll continue to learn, develop and grow,” said Hoyas Coach Ed Cooley.
One of the biggest takes from this game was the horrendous effort from long range by the Hoyas. You are not going to win many games shooting 5 for 26 in any conference and regardless of who is you Head Coach, very few teams recover to win a game with that type of percentage in the Big East.
The Hoyas also missed the same presence from Ismael Massoud, who was just 1 for 6 with 7 points in the same number of minutes played as he did against TCU where he scored 16 points and sort was wide open on several occasions in that game triggering a large run by the Hoyas that was non-existent in this game.
Georgetown will have a chance to rebound on Tuesday night against Coppin State in another one of those late starts. Tip off is scheduled for 8:30pm
