2024-25 Record: 18-16, 8-12 Big East
2024-25 Big East Finish: Seventh, three games behind Villanova and two games in front of a Providence/Butler tie for eighth.
NET: #89KenPom.com: #90BartTorvik.com: #96
Postseason? After getting goofed out of the Big East tournament in the first round by DePaul, Georgetown went on to play in the College Basketball Crown. They snuck past Washington State in the opening round, but lost, 81-69, to Nebraska in the quarterfinals.
Key Departures: I think we can correctly say that Georgetown is losing four starters.
The most obvious loss is the one that we all saw coming almost from the beginning of the season, but definitely by the time we hit the midway portion of the campaign. If you watched Thomas Sorber putting up 14.5 points, 8.5 rebounds, 2.4 assists, 1.5 steals, and 2.0 blocks per game up through suffering a foot injury that required surgery in mid-February and did not think he needed to get to the NBA Draft as fast as possible, well, it’s probably time to start asking yourself if you actually understand the sport of basketball at all. He went #15 in the draft, which is very good, and the fact that he landed with Oklahoma City fresh off their 2025 NBA Championship is very, very good for him.
The only other “yeah, we knew he was leaving” starter on the roster is Micah Peavy, who was on his COVID bonus season of eligibility for one year with the Hoyas. He led the Big East in steals per game at 2.3 and was Georgetown’s top scorer at a shade over 17 points per game. Peavy was a 40% three-point shooter for Gerogetown, and at over 51% inside the arc, it’s honestly hard to judge anyone for letting him be the guy to lead the team in field goal attempts by the time the full season was over.
Georgetown also loses four guys to the transfer portal. Three leave with two years remaining, while the fourth has just one year of eligibility left to go. Jayden Epps and Drew Fielder are the most notable departures in terms of prominence in the rotation and round out our discussion of the four starters that they’re losing. Epps was in and out of the lineup after Christmas for various reasons, and ended up averaging 12.8 points, 2.1 rebounds, 2.3 assists, and over a steal in 27 appearances for the Hoyas. Mississippi State will be his third team after playing at Illinois for a year. Fielder started in all 31 games he played in this season, and he wrapped up his sophomore year with the Hoyas with 7.1 points and 5.4 rebounds per game. He’s got two years of eligibility left, and he’s headed back towards home at Boise State.
The other two transfers are headed out of Washington after transferring in last offseason. Jordan Burks was more productive with Georgetown (5.7 points, 3.4 rebounds, 18.6 minutes) than he was as a freshman at Kentucky, and he’ll spend at least his junior year at UCF. Curtis Williams skipped town after Louisville dismissed Kenny Payne, but his time with the Hoyas was actually slightly less productive. After a sophomore campaign where he averaged 4.7 points while appearing in 33 games, he’s off to Tulane now.
Key Returners: Georgetown returns two rotation players and one guy that I’m at least curious about for next season. Malik Mack led the Hoyas with 4.3 assists per game last year, and he was one of their four double digit scorers at 12.9 per game. He was a competent shooter at over 35% on more than five attempts per game, but I presume the Hoyas would prefer if the former Harvard transfer would shoot better than 40% inside the arc. The only other rotation guy coming back is Caleb Williams, who had a pretty good freshman year, all things considered. He started 14 times in 29 appearances, missing five games in late February and March. He wasn’t asked to carry a workload, and so he averaged 4.3 points and 3.8 rebounds per game.
Julius Halaifonua played double digit minutes off the bench in each of Georgetown’s first six games last season, and then missed the rest of the year due to a fractured ankle that needed surgery. He’s a 7-foot, 270 lb. big man, who had per-40 minute stats of 9.1 points, 6.1 rebounds, 2.0 assists, and 1.5 blocks per game, and he shot 2-for-8 from behind the arc. I’m super fascinated to see what he looks like after rehabbing that ankle. It seems like he was going to have some kind of a role right out of the gate, but the injury swamped that plan.
Key Additions: Georgetown has zero official freshmen on their roster, so that’s an entire choice. There are some guys who redshirted their freshman year last season, so I guess that helps with roster balance.
In any case, I think KJ Lewis (6’4”, 210 lb guard, El Paso, Texas) is the most notable guy out of the six transfer additions. He had a bit of a breakout year this past season for Arizona after being a quality contributor as a freshman. In 2024-25, Lewis averaged 10.8 points, 4.6 rebounds, and 2.9 assists in just under 26 minutes per game even though he almost always came off the bench.
The Hoyas have three “sure, I guess, maybe a fresh start is nice for them?” transfers. DeShawn Harris-Smith (6’5”, 224 lb guard, Woodbridge, Virginia) saw his minutes at Maryland get cut in half going from freshman to sophomore year. He had a nice freshman year with 7.3 points and 4.3 rebounds per game, so maybe he swings back that direction after leaving the Terps in the wake of Kevin Willard taking the Villanova job. He’s probably going to need to shoot better than 20% on threes, though. Langston Love (6’5”, 210 lb guard, Universal City, Texas) spent the last four years at Baylor, although the first one was spent rehabbing a torn ACL. In his three active seasons, he’s averaged 8.5 points and 2.6 rebounds, but he has knocked down 39% of his three-pointers. Love has never really been a starter for the Bears, so that’s worth keeping an eye on. Finally, there’s Jeremiah Williams (6’4”, 200 lb guard, Chicago, Illinois), who is technically on his fourth team in five seasons. He started at Temple, transferred to Iowa State where he tore his Achilles, then transferred to Rutgers but didn’t debut until deep into the season. That short 12 games of his third season was pretty good, but he went backwards in a big way last year. 7.0 points, 2.9 rebounds, and 2.0 assists per game isn’t bad, but it’s not “ah, yes, I see why you want this guy on your team” stuff, and definitely not after you remember that he’s a career 26% three-point shooter.
Finally, Georgetown has two “yeah, but they couldn’t play for a Big East team last year” transfers. Vince Iwuchukwu (7’1”, 257 lb center, Imo State, Nigeria) was essentially a non-factor for St. John’s last season after transferring from USC, so I presume he was told that not much is going to change this season, and now he’s at GU. He averaged 5.4 points and 3.4 rebounds in 15 minutes a game during his time with the Trojans. Isaiah Abraham (6’7”, 205 lb forward, Gainesville, Virginia) was a top 80 prospect when he enrolled at UConn last season, and then he played 32 minutes spread across nine games. 10 of those came against Maryland Eastern Shore in late November, and then he didn’t play at all again until March 1st.
Coach: Ed Cooley, entering his third season at Georgetown and 20th as a Division 1 head coach. He has a record of 27-39 with the Hoyas and 361-261 overall.
Outlook: In the words of Isabella from Phineas & Ferb: Hey, Ed, whatcha doing?
Obviously, going from 9-23 and 2-18 in the Big East in Year 1 to 18-16 and 8-12 in the league in Year 2 is objectively a good thing. Also objectively good: Not completely tanking out like the Hoyas did in their first season where they started out at #159 in the KenPom.com rankings before wrapping up the season at #192. Also objectively good: Not being one of the 50 worst defensive teams in the country, which is what Georgetown was in Cooley’s first season in Washington. Cards on the table: It was Georgetown’s first winning season since 2019, which is also the last time they won eight or more games in Big East action.
There’s reasons to be positive about what Georgetown was doing last year.
Well, if we slide over to BartTorvik.com and filter some data like Gary Parrish taught us to do, we see that Georgetown was #92 in the country up through Valentine’s Day, which is the day right before Thomas Sorber suffered what was his season ending injury. The Hoyas were 15-9 overall and 6-7 in the Big East at that point, and they ranked #211 (blech!) on the offensive end of the floor and #34 on defense.
#116, 3-6 overall, 2-4 in Big East regular season contests, #82 on offense (wait, what?) and #195 on defense. That last part’s a big ol’ yikes, as it would seem that the NBA first round draft pick was the only thing holding Georgetown together on defense. Of course, it also looks like Sorber was holding them back on offense, so win some, lose some, I guess?
The point is thus: The wins and losses might have been better, but there were gigantic problems for Georgetown last season, no matter whether or not Thomas Sorber was playing for them, and at the end of the day, all of those gigantic problems are Ed Cooley’s problems.
And now he returns two rotation players, brings in no obvious impact transfers and no freshmen at all for a sum total of no one who looks like they might have a shot at being a lottery pick. On top of that, we can’t ignore the fact that three of the guys who transferred with eligibility remaining were recruited to Georgetown as transfers by Ed Cooley. Jayden Epps came in before Cooley’s first season, while Jordan Burks and Curtis Williams joined last year. Guys who were, at least in theory, supposed to be the core of the 2025-26 roster have hit the eject button on being at Georgetown for whatever reason. This is after Cooley lost three of the transfers that he brought in after being hired a year ago. For whatever reasons, Ed Cooley is pitching transfers on the joys of his vision for Georgetown basketball, and after they show up and experience it, they’re heading right back out the door to go somewhere else.
So again, I ask: Hey, Ed, whatcha doin’?
It certainly looks like Ed Cooley doesn’t have a plan for the direction of his program. When he was hired in the spring of 2023, the obvious argument for Georgetown to take the 53 year old Cooley over Rick Pitino is that Cooley would be coaching the Hoyas for the long haul whereas the 70 year old Pitino would probably turn in winning results faster but could honestly retire at any time and send the program back into tumult. Other than the retiring thing not cashing yet, the idea about Pitino has proved right at St. John’s over the past two seasons, not just relative to Georgetown which it definitely has, but in general, too.
Cooley? He can’t even get the guys he’s recruiting to the program to stay in the program for whatever reason that may be. I presume a survey of Hoyas fans would turn in a result somewhere along the lines of “well, it better not be because of NIL money, let me tell you what,” seeing as they were happy to tell Providence fans exactly how rich Georgetown was when they poached Cooley from the Friars. On top of that, he hasn’t pulled in a single freshman for this year to continue the idea of building this program long term, which again, that seemed to be the upside to hiring Cooley over Pitino.
Maybe Georgetown can make this all work by surrounding Malik Mack with a bunch of guys playing various roles since no one else on the roster has been asked to be A Dude before now. Maybe the guys who were redshirting last year made the most of their season on the bench and they’re ready to pop. Maybe a couple of the transfers just need a set of fresh surroundings to uncork their potential. I’m not going to go running to my FanDuel app to bet on any of that, but we have to acknowledge that it could happen.
Or maybe Ed Cooley’s the kind of coach who had just three teams to get to an 8 seed or better in the NCAA tournament in 12 seasons at Providence and now that it’s harder to win in this league because UConn is UConn-ing all over the place, things are even more difficult for him. Maybe he’s the kind of coach who got propped up by 10,000 rabid Providence lunatics at the 12,000 seat AMP. Now that he’s coaching in front of 5,600 people on average, several of them wearing road colors — 17K+ vs UConn, for example — in the 20,000 seat Capital One Arena as was the case this past year, maybe things are just one or two steps harder for Ed Cooley, and he’s just not good enough at this to overcome that.
Follow Anonymous Eagle on social media
0 Comments
