Who are the Georgetown Hoyas as they enter the NCAA Tournament?
Are they the team that went 6-1 in its past seven games and buzzed through the Big East Tournament, winning it for the first time since 2007 and cementing a spot in the NCAAs for the first time since 2015?
Or are they the team that looked like a mess in the middle of the season, mired in a 2-7 slump?
Those are questions that will be answered when the 13-12 Hoyas (13-12), the No. 12 seed in the East Region, play the No. 5 seed Colorado (22-8), which is fresh off a trip to the Pac-12 conference title game, in Saturday’s first-round game at Hinkle Fieldhouse in Indianapolis.
The winner will advance to the second round against the winner between Florida State and UNC Greensboro.
Georgetown, with its unlikely postseason run, has become one of the darlings of March thanks to its coach, Patrick Ewing, and the long, determined road he has traveled to find success as a head coach after carving out a Hall of Fame NBA career.
Before being hired in 2017 by his alma mater, Georgetown, Ewing spent 13 years toiling as an assistant coach in the NBA, with stops in Washington, Houston, Orlando and Charlotte. That journey included only two interviews for head coaching jobs, at Sacramento and Memphis, for which he wasn’t hired.
Now Ewing is trying to take the Georgetown program, which his former coach, the late John Thompson, brought to fame, back to glory.
Ewing likes the direction his team has taken while winning six of its final 10 regular-season games followed by the four wins in the conference tournament.
“It took us time to adjust, jell and get ourselves together,’’ Ewing said. “But we have got it going.”
This has, indeed, been a trying season for Georgetown, which began 3-8 and had four games postponed after a COVID-19 outbreak in January. Combine that with having six players transfer out or leave the program in the past season and finishing eighth in an 11-team conference, and what you have is one of the best stories of the NCAA Tournament.
That story will become enhanced if Georgetown is to upset Colorado.
According to the NCAA, heading into this year’s tournament, there had been 50 upsets by 12-seeds since the field expanded to 64 teams in 1985. The lower seed was 50-90 in that span, a 35.7 percent winning percentage. But there were just five years (1988, 2000, 2007, 2015 and 2018) in which a 12 seed hasn’t beaten a No. 5 seed in the men’s tournament.
One statistic that bears watching in this game is how Georgetown shoots from 3-point range. The Hoyas have been inconsistent shooting from long range and are 5-9 this season when failing to shoot 40 percent from beyond the arc. Colorado, meanwhile, has allowed opponents to shoot 40 percent or better from 3-point distance only seven times in 30 games this season.
Georgetown is 0-5 when scoring fewer than 63 points this season and 13-7 when scoring at least 63.
Colorado is led by McKinley Wright IV, one of the best point guards in the Pac-12. He leads the team with 15.5 points and 5.6 assists per game. The Hoyas will counter with first-year guard Dante Harris, who’s coming off a big performance in Big East Tournament, in which he was named most outstanding player.
Colorado makes 82.2-percent from the foul line, the second-best rate in the nation, but the Buffaloes are not a strong rebounding team, averaging 35 rebounds per game. Georgetown averages 40.2 rebounds per game, better than all but 12 teams in the country.