Georgetown was horrible last year, but they had been trending downward since the Big East realigned. Can Patrick Ewing and Co. turn it around this season?
Last December, Georgetown defeated Howard, 85-73, to improve their record to 6-4 on the season. The victory marked their third straight, including a win over long-time rival Syracuse.
Expectations weren’t high for the 2021-22 Hoyas, but no one would have guessed that a mid-December victory over Howard would mark their final one of the season.
Georgetown dropped their next 21 games last season, and finished with the school’s worst record since before they hired John Thompson way back in 1972.
It took Thompson just three seasons to turn a 3-23 Georgetown team into an NCAA Tournament club. Eleven years after he was hired they were national champions.
The 1984 national title came during a 20-year span in which Georgetown reached 19 NCAA Tournaments, elevated the Big East in a way no other program had through the 1980s and early ’90s, and became a cultural phenomenon along the way.
While over 15 years removed from Thompson’s reign, the Hoyas were supposed to be a flag-bearer for the Big East after the league broke off from its football counterparts prior to the 2013-14 season.
For all that has been made of how the likes of Seton Hall and Providence have benefitted from this arrangement, Georgetown has fallen off precipitously since the realignment of 2013.
In the seven seasons prior to the birth of the “new” Big East, Georgetown reached the NCAA Tournament six times. They were ranked in the AP top 10 in all seven of those seasons under Thompson’s son, John Thompson III. Their tournament seeds during those years: 7, 2, 2, 3, 6, 3, 2.
JTIII was fired after four seasons in the basketball-centric Big East. Georgetown made the Tournament once in those four years, a four seed in 2015 that won a first round game before falling to Utah in the second.
Georgetown legend Patrick Ewing was hired to replaced Thompson III in 2017 after a long run as an NBA assistant — the hope being that a Hall of Fame player with the deepest of ties to the program, who is universally respected in the game, would elevate the program back to some semblance of its glory days.
It had the potential to be one of the true feel-good stories in college basketball.
And yet, with a miracle run in the 2021 Big East Tournament not withstanding, Ewing hasn’t come close to reviving the program — and they bottomed out a season ago.
The Hoyas haven’t had a winning record in Big East play since Ewing was hired. He had quite the rebuilding job ahead of him, so a 5-13 conference mark in year one can be excused. And when Georgetown finished 9-9 in the conference in 2019, the feeling was that Ewing was finding ways to win with an average roster (in reality, that team featured talented underclassmen in Mac McClung, James Akinjo, Josh LeBlanc, Jamarko Pickett, and Jahvon Blair, along with a good senior center in Jessie Govan).
Much of their promising, young talent from the 2019 team defected within a year. Akinjo transferred to Arizona, McClung was off to Texas Tech, and LeBlanc was dismissed from the school.
Since the promising young core of 2019 scattered, Georgetown has gone 5-13, 7-9, and 0-19 in conference play over the past three years.
They hit rock bottom last season when a DePaul team with a 1-9 Big East record ripped off a 26-0 run against them.
It would have been inconceivable in 2013, but Georgetown is 58-103 in conference games since realignment. The only team with a worse record during that time has been lowly DePaul.
Despite their struggles, Ewing survived last season. He’ll lead the Hoyas this year with three new assistants, highlighted by Kevin Nickelberry, who came to Georgetown after Will Wade was fired at LSU. Nickelberry helped rebuild the roster pretty dramatically this spring and was elevated to Associate Head Coach just four months after being hired.
On paper, there’s a lot to like about the 2022-23 Hoyas. Nickelberry brought with him Brandon Murray and Bradley Ezewiro from Baton Rouge. Murray may be the most talented player on their roster next season. An All-SEC Freshman team performer, the 6’6 Murray averaged 10 points per game last season. The Baltimore native was considered one of the top five transfers on the market this spring, due to his ability on both sides of the ball.
A pair of familiar faces could determine which way next season breaks for Ewing and Company. UConn transfer Akok Akok was, at one time, a borderline five star high school prospect due to his elite shot blocking ability and outside shot. Akok tore his achilles in Feb. 2020, and struggled to find consistent minutes under Dan Hurley upon his return, despite showing flashes last season. Even if he’s lost some bounce, Akok is a very good shooter from range who could thrive against lighter frontcourts (Hurley told the press last December that he didn’t think he could play the lean Akok much against Providence’s physical front line, we’ll see if Ewing agrees).
In one of the odder stories of the offseason, 6’10, 240 pound center Qudus Wahab is returning to Georgetown after transferring to Maryland in the spring of 2021. Wahab started to flourish as a sophomore under Ewing, averaging just shy of 13 points per game, but his productivity dipped for a Maryland program that saw head coach Mark Turgeon quit a month into the season.
Wahab, Ezewiro, and Akok should bring different dimensions to a frontcourt that also returns 7’1 sophomore Ryan Mutombo.
The backcourt will look drastically different. While Murray will garner much of the preseason pub, there are two under-the-radar additions that are quite intriguing in transfer Jay Heath (from Arizona State) and freshman Denver Anglin, who just might be the best shooter in the class of 2022.
Providence pushed for Anglin, and hosted him for an official visit last spring, before he committed to Georgetown. The New Jersey native stood out on a New York Rens team that may have been the best on last year’s Nike EYBL circuit before Covid hit hard. That was a group headlined by five star big man Kyle Filipowski (Duke), Dominic Barlow (now with the Spurs), and Simeon Wilcher (North Carolina commit in the class of 2023). It doesn’t take long to fall in love with Anglin’s shooting stroke.
Heath will require a waiver to play next season, and if it is granted he will be one of the real sleepers in the Big East next season. Heath was a 13-14 point per game scorer at Boston College during his two years there, before putting up over 10 a game at ASU. He’s a DC native who plays with a lot of grit and scores in a variety of ways. Heath is a tough kid who shot 43% from deep last year.
Ewing and his staff also added transfers Primo Spears (over 12 ppg at Duquesne) and Bryson Mozone (15 a game at USC Upstate). Spears was a low efficiency scorer as a freshman in the A-10 (.367 from the field, .300 from 3), but he closed the year out tremendously with 25 points at George Washington, 34 points versus La Salle, and 30 against URI in his final three games.
Mozone has four years of college under his belt, and proved he could put up numbers against a high major opponent after going for 20 points, six rebounds, and four assists in last year’s season opener at South Carolina.
Ewing also welcomes back junior guard Dante Harris. Harris averaged nearly 12 points per game as a sophomore last season, but has seen his stock inflated somewhat after winning the MVP of the 2021 Big East Tournament. He’s a sub-40% shooter from the field and sub-30% from three in his career. His .729 points per possession ranks in the 19th percentile nationally. He is a pretty good isolation scorer, but ranked as one of the worst defenders in the Big East last season (3rd percentile nationally in points per possession against and allowed opponents to shoot nearly 53%).
Upgrading the talent was priority number one for Ewing this spring. As he recently told Fox Sports’ John Fanta: “You can’t do without talent… Nothing against the guys that we had here, they tried their hardest. We just didn’t have enough (last year) to get over the hump.”
The talent has certainly been upgraded, and now the challenge for Ewing is finding cohesion after eight players left last season and seven new transfers were welcomed in.
There is still tremendous feel-good potential with Ewing and the Hoyas. If he were to turn the program around it would mean great publicity for the league, but the pressure will be turned way up in 2022-23 after the embarrassment of last season.