Point guard scores 24 in win over Louisville
Two days ago Chris Wright couldn’t score. On Monday he couldn’t be stopped, following a game in which he didn’t have a single point with a season-high 24 in Georgetown’s 62-59 victory over Louisville.
After the Hoyas surrendered an 11-point second-half lead, Wright drove into the lane, spun, fell, and received no foul call but still managed to scoop the ball toward the basket, where it spun in softly to tie the game 55-55 with 2:55 to play.
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Hollis Thompson put Georgetown ahead for good with a 3-pointer 52 seconds later, and Wright gave the Hoyas their final points of the night at the line, where he finished a perfect 8-for-8.
“My role is I have to see how the game is going,” said Wright, who had his first zero-point outing since his freshman year at Villanova on Saturday. “In the last game, Austin [Freeman] was hitting shots all over the place early and often so why force something, why force the issue. … Today I was open. We got out in transition, and I got a few transition buckets early, and I just felt like if I kept attacking, good things would happen.”
Freeman added 13 points for the Hoyas (17-5, 6-4 Big East), and Julian Vaughn delivered a clutch 10 points on 4 of 4 shooting from the field, including a short right-hander in the lane during Georgetown’s key 15-5 run in the second half.
Terrence Jennings led the Cardinals (17-5, 6-3 Big East) with 18 points and Preston Knowles had 11, but the night was utterly forgettable for Louisville point guard Peyton Siva. On the same day he was named Big East player of the week, Siva committed a career-high eight turnovers, including seven in the first half, and finished with just five points and three assists.
Siva’s only field goal of the night, a 3-pointer with the shot clock expiring, sparked Louisville’s comeback, but he missed a potential game-tying 3-pointer on the game’s final possession.
As the Verizon Center crowd of 12,164 rose in celebration, Wright clenched his fist to celebrate Georgetown’s fifth straight win, which pulled the Hoyas into fourth place in the nation’s toughest conference after dropping four of their first five league games.
“We have a poised group,” Hoyas head coach John Thompson III said. “We went through a difficult stretch where we were not making shots, and you can sit here and talk about the offense this and the offense that. We were getting good shots. They just weren’t going in. We’re past that.”
