One down, championship to go?
The Huskies finally broke the MSG curse with a win over a god-awful DePaul team yesterday, but looked less than stellar in doing so, continuing a disappointing finish to a season that at one point appeared to have big-time promise.
But after losing seven of their past 11 coming into New York, and with only one win over a ranked opponent in five shots, the Huskies appear to have gotten a lucky break in their bracket. Not only did they get to start off with the worst team in the conference, allowing them an easy victory to brush off the pressure of breaking the hex and giving them a shot to build a bit of early momentum, but they also get a Georgetown team reeling since the loss of go-to guard Chris Wright (broken wrist).
The Hoyas were the No. 9 team in the country when Georgetown strolled into The Morgue on Feb. 16, but it has since lost four of five -- including a 78-70 loss to the Huskies, in which they for some reason eschewed the voodoo powers of the zone defense and consequently felt UConn's McPowers -- forcing their fans into a state of panic and to misguidedly devote themselves to the Charlie Sheen meme, which gets exponentially less funny with each passing hour.
Georgetown still has Austin Freeman, an All-Big East selection who's averaging almost 18 points per game on 56.8 percent eFG, but its offense has lacked a much-needed punch of late, having scored under 52 points over its past three -- by far its worst offensive performances of the season.
Still, if there's one team that can ail its wounds, it's UConn. The Huskies ultimately turned yesterday's game into a rout, but not before turning the ball over a team-high 20 times. I'm willing to write off some of their poor performance to playing down to the opponent, but at this point, any team that can trot out a competent zone owns the upper hand against UConn.
Go Huskies.