Rush The Court

I. Renko is a DC-based correspondent for Rush the Court. You can follow him on twitter @IRenkoHoops. He filed this report after Friday night’s game between Georgetown and Tennessee in the SEC/Big East Challenge.

Those of us who arrived at the Verizon Center in D.C. on Friday night were not expecting a shootout between Georgetown and Tennessee.  When you mix Cuonzo Martin’s grinding style with John Thompson III’s patient offense and zone defense , it’s a fair bet that you’ll get a low-scoring game.  But no one in the building predicted this.

In the ugliest game of the year to date, the Hoyas scraped their way to a 37-36 victory.  How brutal an offensive night was this?  This brutal:

• The last points of the game were scored with 4:09 left in the game, when Markel Starks hit what would prove to be the game-winning jumper.
• Georgetown shot 36.4 percent from the field and 44.4 percent from the free throw line.
• But they were not as bad as Tennessee, which managed to shoot 32.6% from field — which in turn was not as bad as the 27.3% the Vols shot from the charity stripe.
• Each team shot worse than 20 percent from the three-point line:  Tennessee at 18.8% and Georgetown at 14.3%.
• No single player scored in double figures.
• Jarnell Stokes had more rebounds (nine) than any player had points.

Yet both coaches seemed nonplussed about the whole lurid affair. Listening to Martin’s post-game press conference, you could have been forgiven for thinking that the final score was 67-66, not 37-36.  After providing a terse and banal summary of the contest (a “competitive, physical game”), Martin dismissed the notion that he was unhappy with how the game was played: “Oh that doesn’t bother me at all.  At the end of the day, you’re trying to get out with a W. I don’t need anything to be pretty. … If you get a W, leave the scene. How we win it doesn’t matter to me.” That may not be what Tennessee fans, who had grown used to Bruce Pearl’s up-and-down style, wanted to hear. But Martin’s grinding style is what made him a success at Missouri State, and it’s that success in the win column that landed him in Knoxville.

For his part, Thompson III was a bit more forthcoming about the unusual nature of the contest, noting that he had “never been a part of a game like this” before later correcting himself: “Actually I have been a part of a game like this.  I think I was eight.”  But Thompson wasn’t overly concerned about his team’s offensive woes, attributing them to an atypically poor shooting night rather than any systemic failure: “We can do a few better things, but it was one of those days when the ball just didn’t go into the basket.”

Indeed, despite the narrowness of the win, Georgetown consistently looked like the better team.  Although Tennessee deserves credit for its tough, physical defense, the severity of the Hoyas’ offensive struggles was more a function of an off shooting night than anything else.  But that was only part of the story for the Vols.  They missed makeable shots, for sure, but there were two bigger concerns: (1) their struggles cracking Georgetown’s zone defense and (2) their poor utilization of Stokes, who had just three field goal attempts. Martin attributed the former to a failure of the “flash man” to effectively flash into the zone, and the latter to Stokes’ lack of aggressiveness in establishing post position. But a tough Georgetown defense exacerbated both problems. Relying on their length and range, the Hoyas were constantly clogging up the passing lanes. And they crowded Stokes all night so that on the occasions when he did get the ball, he was unable to capitalize, instead coughing up four turnovers. No doubt Tennessee has some work to do on attacking zone defenses, but the good news is they’re not likely to see one as good as Georgetown’s this year.