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“He’s worked on his game all summer long, he’s worked on his body,” Ewing said. “Right response at the right time.”Įwing also reserved praise for Don Carey, who spent his first three years at Siena before joining Georgetown’s roster last season as a graduate transfer. Rice, who had struggled shooting the ball in his first two games as a Hoya, stressed that he never lost confidence in his shot. “Some of those shots I was like, ‘No, no, no, yes!'” Ewing said. A steady onslaught of Carey and Rice buckets kept the Saints at bay the rest of the evening.Īfter the game, Coach Ewing had nothing but praise for Rice, joking about his hot shooting night. A brief Siena run, which cut the deficit to 14, was quashed by a Jaden Billingsley alley-oop on a sweet feed from guard Jordan Riley. The Hoyas took this momentum into the second half, jumping out to a 18 point lead by the 14:42 mark in the half. Siena fought back, cutting the lead to four points with three minutes remaining in the half, but the Hoyas closed out strong, entering halftime with a commanding 44-34 lead. That would be the closest Siena got the rest of the evening, as Rice’s sharpshooting and Harris’ steady hand and pesky defense spurred an 11-2 run. Siena clawed back, cutting the deficit to 15-13 with just under 11 minutes left in the half. The Hoyas, spurred on by early Rice and Harris three-pointers, quickly jumped out to a 10-2 lead. None of the three were particularly effective, combining for just 5 points and 6 rebounds. Despite Ighoefe getting the start, Ewing continued his three-man platoon at the center position, with Ighoefe, freshman Ryan Mutombo, and junior Malcolm Wilson all playing between 11 and 16 minutes. Senior forward Jackson Stormo led the Siena attack with a career-high 25 points and 11 rebounds on 77 percent shooting from the field, though the rest of his team, despite open looks from three, struggled to get things going the entire evening.Ĭoach Patrick Ewing started junior center Timothy Ighoefe, sophomore guard Dante Harris, Carey, Rice, and freshman guard Aminu Mohammed-a lineup that saw success against American earlier in the week. Led by the scorching shooting of senior transfer forward Kaiden Rice (23 points, 7-10 from three point range) and graduate guard Don Carey (20 points, 7-9 from the field), the Hoyas never relinquished the lead and fended off a Saints second-half comeback attempt. Perhaps most visible was Michael Graham, a substitute on the 1984 team, who was the spitting image of every Angry Black Man stereotype: He was the bald-headed, bruising spark plug on a championship squad before academic troubles forced him to transfer away.Coming off their first win of the season against American University, the Georgetown Hoyas men’s basketball team (2-1, Big East), topped the Siena Saints (0-4, MAAC) 83-65 Friday night in a wire-to-wire victory. Soon, African-American basketball players-Patrick Ewing, Sleepy Floyd, Fred Brown, Reggie Williams-became the university’s most visible symbol. By the late ‘70s, the Hoyas were starting an all-black five. As part of the Big East, Georgetown played regularly against the finest black players from New York and Philadelphia, helping to market the Hoyas to both recruits and East Coast hoops fans.
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Before the Big East, Georgetown was part of the sprawling Eastern College Athletic Conference, which represented more than 200 schools. (He had to wait for one of his first recruits, Mike Riley, to finish a hitch in the Navy.) The Hoyas’ rise came shortly after the founding of the Big East Conference in 1979. Thompson recruited inner-city black players, often well after they’d graduated high school. Mediocre Georgetown teams composed of white parochial-school graduates soon became a relic. When Thompson came to Georgetown in 1972, he wasn’t plucked from some other sideline legend’s “coaching tree.” Rather, he had been plying his trade at a tiny Catholic high school in northeast Washington, D.C., at a time when the only notable black coaches were Lenny Wilkens and Bill Russell-both player/coaches for NBA teams. That was inevitable when an elite Eastern university, then as now overwhelmingly white, started fielding teams made up almost exclusively of black players. Georgetown basketball under John Thompson was always intertwined with racial politics. But the fear, back then, had as much to do with race as hoops.