Georgetown could have made it a great week for the Big East. Pittsburgh beat Duke on Thursday night to earn some much needed respect for the Beast. But today, Memphis defeated Georgetown handily, 85-71. You have to give a lot of credit to Calipari — in the first half Memphis looked lost both on offense and defense, but something Calipari did at half really lit a fire underneath the Tigers. They came out in the second half with a swagger and never looked back.

The one constant in the game was that Roy Hibbert contributed very little — he ended up with 6 points on 8 shot attempts, and only really asserted himself during a small stretch in the second half. Of course, he was going against Joey Dorsey, who is nothing short of a a cuter version of Ben Wallace. While much of the press will blame Hibbert for the loss, I don’t think he played terrible. He could have drawn more fouls (he shot 0 free throws, which is inexcusable) and been a bit more aggressive, but overall he played within the Georgetown system.

Georgetown ran into trouble today not because Hibbert disappeared (yes, that’s the reason for the title of this blog post), but because they didn’t play great defense and started their offense too late. This was somewhat an issue last year, too (see here).

What concerns me most about Georgetown and Hibbert is that Hibbert must be thinking NBA this year. He gave up a great chance last year, and certainly one of the questions about him is his assertiveness. The difficulty is that “taking over the game” isn’t really a part of the Georgetown system. Making great cuts, passing the ball, moving without the ball, ensuring good spacing on the court — these things are part of the Georgetown system. As such, it is difficult to “take over the game” without messing up the system. My fear is that Hibbert will feel he’ll need to show his assertiveness this season, but this will mess up team chemistry. I thought I started to see this happen during this sequence in today’s game:

What do you think — am I reading too much into this?

Categories: Commentary, Georgetown, donald, Game Banter