and it wasn’t that close
With 4:56 left in the first half, Ben Gold scored on a layup to put YOUR Marquette Golden Eagles up 29-20 on Georgetown on Wednesday night at Fiserv Forum.
and yet
somehow
Georgetown led, 37-33, at the half, thanks to a Langston Love three-pointer with three seconds left before the horn.
- Yes, that is a 17-4 run to end the half for the Hoyas
- Marquette would get closer than four points on just two occasions in the second half. One was on a Caedin Hamilton and-1 with 19:21 left, and the other was on a pair of Chase Ross free throws with 8:41 to play. Bot times, the Golden Eagles cut the margin to just three points.
You are currently thinking: “Hey, wait, that headline says Marquette lost by nine, it was a three point game with just under nine minutes left?” Sure was, boss. Georgetown followed up those Ross free throws with a 17-5 run. Hoyas by 15, 75-60, 3:18 to play, and that’s your ball game.
Losing sucks. Losing a third straight game sucks. Falling to 5-7 overall this season sucks. Dropping under 100 in the KenPom.com rankings for the first time since they were pushed back into double digits by a 66-61 win over Creighton on February 24, 2016, sucks.
But the thing that really grinds my gears about this loss?
Marquette looked great for about 15 minutes on Wednesday night. Marquette finally looked like the version of themselves that I thought they could be this season. Marquette finally looked like a team that was really annoyed about being under .500 in the month of December for the first time since Shaka Smart was hired.
MU started off this game shooting 6-for-10 from the field, including a pair of three-pointers, one each from Adrien Stevens and Sean Jones. Ben Gold’s layup for a nine point lead moved them to 11-for-25 in the game, and a dunk from Damarius Owens made it 12-for-26. No, 46.2% isn’t great, but they did have four three-pointers in there, so that’s 53.8% on effective field goal percentage, so that’s fine.
Marquette finished the half shooting just 43.3% with an eFG of just 50%.
Marquette shot 41.2% in the second half and just 20% on 15 three-point attempts. That’s an eFG of just 45.6%.
From that Owens dunk forward, Marquette shot just 15-for-38 from the field. That’s 39%. From that Owens dunk forward, Marquette had an effective field goal percentage of just 43.4%.
I said it in the preview: Whichever teams manages to shake off their lousy shooting this season will win the game.
Turns out, Georgetown only needed to shoot 47% from the field with an eFG of 50% in order to succeed, because Marquette was awful here. Part of that is Georgetown’s existence, as they were able to not care in the slightest about MU’s outside shooting for most of the game — 27% overall, 20% in the second half! — and so they could just collapse on whatever driver was taking the ball inside with absolutely zero worry about getting burned.
Zaide Lowery did not appear in this game.
5-7 overall. 0-1 in the Big East.
20 more of these things left to go.
Highlights, such as they are, courtesy of GoMarquette.com and Fox Sports:
Up Next: Got a good news, bad news situation for you. On Saturday, Marquette heads to the western-most outpost of the Big East to face Creighton. The Bluejays are just 6-5 on the year and have been struggling mightily after the loss of preseason all-Big East forward Jackson McAndrew to a season ending injury. That’s the good news.
The bad news is that Creighton shot 49% from behind the three-point line and 73% inside it on their way to a 98-57 victory on the road at Xavier on Wednesday night. If that’s a sign that the Bluejays figured something out, Marquette’s in a lot of trouble. Tipoff on Peacock is scheduled for 7:30pm Central.
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Category: General Sports
