December 5, 2017 - After defeating Coppin State 76-60 last night at Capital One Arena, besting the Eagles in score, shooting, rebounding, assists and points in the paint, all while never trailing, some would assume Georgetown’s Hoyas were celebratory. Not so much.
G’Town’s head coach Pat Ewing said afterward he's happy to walk away victorious, before running of several issues.
Offensively Ewing was displeased with the number of jump shots the Hoyas took. While it’s true his team did score 30 points in the paint,” I thought we settled too much. I’m for guy taking the shots when they have them” he said. “They had nobody who can check Marcus or Jessie. And I thought the ball should at least touch the paint first, before we took those threes. So, we have to do a better job of that”.
That would be the Hoyas’ best scoring threats, a junior, interior tandem of Jessie Govan and Marcus Derrickson. The former led all scores with 26 points. Derrickson, for his part, logged 13 points.
Collectively they took 20 of G’Town’s 46 shots, helping the team to 50% shooting from the field. Their 60% shooting number (12-20) buoyed a 6-18 team wide mark from beyond the arc, work that ironically included Derrickson going 2-4 on long balls, Govan 1-1. Such offensive production was crucial, as only freshman Jamarko Pickett joined them in double figure scoring (13 points).
Coppin’s game plan consisted of making it hard for all of Georgetown’s players to score, initially.
“That’s our principles. That’s what we want to do” stated Coppin State’s head coach Juan Dixon, when asked if his team normally ‘loads’ or tilts his defense severely toward the ball. “We want to make opposing teams play on the backside of our defense. Make them make another play…When we load up and take away opponent’s strong side action, normally in college basketball, they don’t play a lot on the backside”.
Despite that, Georgetown (6-0) still wanted to get the ball inside, as according to sophomore guard Jagan Mosely “From memory this was the first team to really pack it in on us, because we have Jessie and Marcus. So skip pass was open all night. But obviously with the size difference we wanted to get it into Jessie and Marcus”.
Ewing noted “Just because a team is ‘weaking’ it or sending it opposite, that’s something happens a lot”. Resultantly his guys must adjust.
The Hoyas had 12 more rebounds than Coppin State (40-28). Govan was particularly active, pacing the game with 16. Doing so is a consistent expectation of him, just ask Ewing, who opined “Well, he had 14 rebounds tonight, he should have had 20, or 30…he did a good job of rebounding tonight”.
Since Coppin State is “not a very good rebounding team”, per Ewing, Govan et al “should have done a much better job of securing a lot more rebounds than we did”. The Eagles (0-8), have been outrebounded every game this year.
Govan is being pushed to clean glass, as “Coach Ewing has been harping on me since day one to just go hard. Play every possession as it’s your last, and everything else will take care of itself. With that comes the rebounds”, revealed the center.
Interestingly enough, his “teammates kind of know I’m trying to get a lot of rebounds. When they see a ball near me they just start going back on offense, because I don’t want to bark at them to let me get it”.
Turnovers were again an issue for Ewing’s bunch, who coughed up the ball 16 times to Coppin Sate’s 13. Several of those can be attributed to late Eagle usage of a Diamond press.
“It’s still disappointing by the way we handled it” said Ewing of his team’s reaction to Coppin’s pressure. “Especially because we worked on it so much. We have to do a much better job of it”.
Mosely (four points, four rebounds) attributed his team’s slippage against pressure to “I think it just happened pretty quickly”. While allowing “We’ve been working on press breaks, but we’ve been kind of working on 2-2-1 presses, not more of a trapping press”, there is no doubt facility versus pressure is a must for Georgetown going forward.
What else should the Hoyas focus upon before Thursday’s home, 830p EST, Capital One Arena tilt with Howard?
“If it was one thing I wish we could have improved on is our free throws. Myself included. I missed three. We missed 12 as a team” noted Govan. “That’s big; if we are going to beat the teams in the BIG EAST, tougher teams coming up, we have to make our free throws. We didn’t’ do that today”. His team only canned 66.7% of its 36 charity stripe attempts.
Coppin State, which shot 15-18 (83.3%) from the free throw line, 30% overall and 27.3% on three balls next tangles with Navy. An 7p EST tilt, the game takes place at Coppin State’s Physical Education Complex Arena in West Baltimore.
Last night’s loss in which senior guard Tre Thomas (13 points) and freshman guard Taqwain Drummond (10 points), joined graduate guard Karonn Davis in double figure scoring, seemed to put some air under the Eagle’s wings.
“We kept up with these guys” rightly noted Davis, led his team with 20 points, eight rebounds and four assists. “If we can keep up with these guys (the Eagles were down just five with 9:04 to play after a Drummond three pointer), we can play with a lot of teams in the country”.
Ewing’s conversation to his group: “My message to the team is we have to get better every day. Every day, every game”.
