It was obvious when John Thompson III inked his consensus top 15 recruiting class that he would be relying on those five recruits to make an immediate impact on his program. While there is no transcendent player who headlines the class, the group is talented enough to the point where JTIII can play each of them significantly — 36 percent of all available minutes through two games, to be exact — and put as many as three freshmen on the floor at the same time. On Saturday, his assuredness paid off as freshmen carried Georgetown to an easy victory against St. Francis (NY) by scoring 42 of the Hoyas’s 83 total points. But on Tuesday night in the team’s 78-62 win over Texas A&M-Corpus Christi, the Hoyas’ head coach was forced to deal with some of the inconsistency that comes with youth. Against the Islanders, his heralded corps of rookies only chipped in 16 of the 78 total points. This issue of consistency will need to be addressed if Georgetown hopes to crack the Top 25 and get the national attention that they’re used to.
JTIII will need L.J. Peak to be aggressive in every outing to win the Big East (Jonathan Newton/Washington Post).
The group that was so impressive over the weekend was far less so on Tuesday night, taking a number of bad shots and committing half of the team’s 16 turnovers. L.J. Peak, a wing from Gaffney, South Carolina, and the only starter from his class, led all scorers with 23 points on 8-for-8 shooting in Georgetown’s season opener, but he struggled to contribute 10 points on 3-of-10 shooting on Tuesday. Three others — Isaac Copeland, a power forward from Wolfeboro, New Hampshire; Paul White, another power forward from Chicago, Illinois; and Tre Campbell, the only Washington DC native — all played significant minutes in both games. But their performances in each were in stark contrast with one another – as a collective, the trio went from 19 points over the weekend to a mere six on Tuesday. The decline was felt systematically, as the Hoyas went into the half tied with the Southland Conference team.
As a result, the Hoyas deferred to veterans Joshua Smith (20 points, 12 rebounds) and Aaron Bowen (13 points) to pull away from the Islanders in the second half. Between the returnees and the freshmen, it’s clear that the Hoyas have enough talent to become one of the top teams in the Big East this year. JTIII knows what he has in his upperclassmen, but his team’s potential will only be reached if his freshmen are positive contributors every time they suit up. If they can learn to be as consistently active as they were against St. Francis (NY) over the weekend — more St. Francis, less TAMU-CC — then this team has a legitimate shot to challenge Villanova for the conference title and get this program back into the national spotlight.