Ed Cooley’s Georgetown team looks painfully familiar
It’s fair to say, much more was hoped for out of Ed Cooley in his first season at Georgetown
nypost.com
By Zach Braziller
Nobody was expecting overnight results. The NCAA Tournament wasn’t a projection, nor was a top-six finish in the Big East.
But it’s fair to say, much more was hoped for out of Ed Cooley in his first season at Georgetown. Really, it’s hard to differentiate these defenseless Hoyas from their recent predecessors under Patrick Ewing.
The only thing saving Georgetown from the Big East basement is a historically bad DePaul team, which already fired Tony Stubblefield 18 games into his third season. DePaul is Georgetown’s lone league win, a three-point victory at home.
On Saturday, Georgetown was embarrassed by No. 9 Marquette in a 34-point debacle. That was similar to a recent 24-point home loss to Butler. There have been flashes of competitiveness, a four-point home loss to Seton Hall and one-point setback to Xavier. But those performances have been followed up by abysmal efforts.
Georgetown is actually worse defensively than last year. It is 301st in the country in efficiency, after finishing 240th a season ago. The offense is significantly better, in the top 100 in terms of efficiency. It was 189th under Ewing last winter. It is a woeful defensive rebounding team, ranked 309th in the country in defensive rebounding percentage at 69.4 percent. It is 181st in KenPom. The only power-conference schools worse are Vanderbilt and, of course, DePaul.
Cooley was supposed to first bring respectability. Make Georgetown a team that would consistently provide a representative effort. Play tough and physical. That has not happened.
Upon taking the job, he opted for a traditional rebuild rather than an immediate fix, bringing in mostly younger players, whether they were transfers or high school recruits. Next year’s class is ranked 17th in the country and his current team’s best players are sophomore Jayden Epps, the Big East’s third-leading scorer, and junior Dontrez Styles. So there is legitimate hope for the future, but it was a surprising tactic in the Name, Image & Likeness and transfer portal era, when first-year coaches have enjoyed immediate success. Rick Pitino (St. John’s), Kim English (Providence) and Chris Beard (Ole Miss) all have teams firmly in the NCAA Tournament mix.
At Georgetown, the bar was incredibly low. Two Big East wins the previous two years. Without a winning record since the 2018-19 campaign. The last time Georgetown had a winning record in conference play was 2014-15. Cooley has yet to change anything in that regard.
Now, I expect him to turn this once-powerful program around, to make Georgetown matter again sooner than later. When Cooley took over at Providence in 2011, the Friars were coming off five losing seasons in seven years. He’s proven to be able to navigate the transfer portal well and maximize talent.
Georgetown fans would like to see that for themselves — because at this point, there’s not much of a difference between the Cooley Hoyas and the Ewing Hoyas.
Rewriting mystery
Time for a history lesson. As St. John’s has hit a significant rough patch, losing five of its past six games to fall back onto the NCAA Tournament bubble, there have been a ton of takes about last year’s team, many suggesting Pitino should’ve kept that group together.That team coached by Mike Anderson went 18-15 and finished eighth in the Big East at 7-13. It was 2-14 in Quad 1 and 2 games. It’s easy to just fault Anderson, say he did a poor job, and that is true to some extent. But it was also not a good mix of players, as evidenced by the on-court performance. That team had an offense ranked 111th in efficiency and it was ranked 98th in the NET.
Several of the players transferred down. Some are having success at the high-major level, particularly AJ Storr at sixth-ranked Wisconsin. But let’s not forget what this team looked like last year, simply because the current Johnnies haven’t performed well of late.
At this time last year, St. John’s wasn’t anywhere close to the NCAA Tournament, and had a difficult schedule the rest of the way. The opposite is true of this year’s version.
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