SI:AM | Two of Men’s Basketball’s Biggest Programs Are in Shambles

Plus, our picks for the NBA All-Star teams.

Good morning, I’m Dan Gartland. Let me brag for a moment that Georgetown’s fall from grace means my alma mater, Fordham, has the best men’s basketball record of any East Coast Jesuit school.

In today’s SI:AM:

📉 Louisville and Georgetown’s struggles

🌟 East and West NBA All-Star Picks

🏆 Who should win the Royal Rumble

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Bluebloods bleeding

Casual college basketball fans can usually rely on brand names to tell them who the good teams are. The South Carolina and UConn women are usually among the nation’s elite, just like the Kansas and Gonzaga men. But this year, two of the sport’s trademark men’s programs are among the worst power conference teams in the country.

With a five-point win over DePaul at home Tuesday, Georgetown ensured that it would not suffer what had previously appeared to be a shockingly likely indignity: a second straight winless season in Big East play. The victory snapped the Hoyas’ 29-game conference losing streak, but make no mistake: at 6–15, Georgetown is a mess of epic proportions right now.

The good news for the Hoyas is that things could always be worse. Just look at Louisville. After losing to Boston College on the road last night, the Cardinals are a dismal 2–18 this season.

So how did they get here? Let’s start with Georgetown. The Hoyas, once a fixture in the NCAA tournament, have actually been struggling for a while now. The school fired longtime coach John Thompson III in 2017 after consecutive losing seasons and hired Patrick Ewing as his replacement. Ewing, a Georgetown alum and rising NBA assistant coach, seemed like a great choice to turn the program around. In his second season in charge, ’18–19, the Hoyas went 19–14 and made the NIT. It seemed like a step in the right direction. But Georgetown hasn’t finished above .500 since. After going 9–12 in the ’20–21 season, the Hoyas engineered a miracle run through the Big East tournament, winning four straight games to claim the championship and earn their first NCAA tournament berth since ’15.

The past two years have been a disaster for Georgetown. Until Tuesday, the program’s win over Creighton in the 2021 Big East tournament final was its most recent Big East victory. The Hoyas went 6–25 (0–19 in conference play) last season and are exceedingly unlikely to win another game this season. Ewing is on thin ice, to say the least. On Jan. 4, Georgetown athletic director Lee Reed released a statement acknowledging this is “a challenging and frustrating time” for the program but did not address Ewing’s job security.

In retrospect, it’s remarkable that Georgetown, a Jesuit school with 7,500 undergrads and restrictive admission standards, was able to become a college basketball power in the first place. Maybe the sport has just passed it by. It’s a different story at Louisville, though. As a public school in a basketball-mad state with a gleaming new-ish downtown arena, Louisville has been able to keep pace in its arms race with cross-state rival Kentucky.

But the Cardinals are, without exaggeration, one of the worst teams in all of Division I this season. Their only wins came against Western Kentucky and Florida A&M (back to back!). They’re ranked 301st (out of 363 teams) in KenPom, right behind Texas Southern. The next lowest power conference team is three-win Cal at No. 239. And while Georgetown’s decline has been steady, the Cardinals spent two weeks in December 2019 at No. 1 in the AP poll. Since then, everything has gone wrong.

As Pat Forde wrote earlier this week, the fall started with a pair of scandals (one involving sex workers and another involving an alleged payment to land a recruit) that rocked the program in the last half of the previous decade. Chris Mack, the coach hired to guide Louisville through the uncertainty, resigned under duress last season and was replaced by Kenny Payne, a former Louisville player and longtime Kentucky assistant. This season has shown how difficult the rebuild will be.

The best of Sports Illustrated

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• Chris Mannix and Rohan Nadkarni revealed who they’d send to the NBA All-Star Game from the East and West, respectively.
• Mannix also wrote about how Anthony Davis’s return could spark the Lakers.
• One of WWE’s biggest shows of the year is Saturday, and Justin Barrasso gives his picks to win the men’s and women’s Royal Rumble matches.
• The Cowboys fired five assistant coaches after their playoff loss to the 49ers.
• Patrick Reed and Rory McIlroy are involved in some hilarious golf beef.

The top five...

… things I saw yesterday:

5. Gio Reyna’s stoppage-time game-winner for Dortmund. (It was his second straight match with the winning goal.)

4. Mitch Marner’s solo game-winner in overtime against the Rangers.

3. Damian Lillard’s 60 points on 29 shots. (He had the best true shooting percentage of any 60-point game.)

2. Nikola Jokić’s reaction to seeing two fans kiss while he was giving an interview.

1. This Twitter thread debunking the viral video of a McDonald’s delivery at a college basketball game. It appears to have been a YouTube prank.

SIQ

On this day in 1997, Mario Lemieux tied an NHL record by scoring four goals in a single period. Who matched that feat this season?

• Tage Thompson
• Mikko Rantanen
• Jack Hughes
• Bo Horvat

Yesterday’s SIQ: On Jan. 25, 1989, Michael Jordan scored his 10,000th career point in just his 303rd game. Of course, Wilt Chamberlain scored his 10,000th point faster, but who did Jordan surpass to become the second-fastest player to reach the milestone?

• Oscar Robertson
• Moses Malone
• John Havlicek
• Kareem Abdul-Jabbar

Answer: Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, who scored his 10,000th point in his 318th career game. It took 303 games for Jordan and just 236 for Chamberlain.

That’s a preposterous average of more than 42 points per game for Wilt to reach 10,000. Chamberlain passed Bob Pettit (20,880 points) to become the NBA’s all-time leading scorer Feb. 14, 1966, and retired with 31,419. He held the record until April 5, 1984, when Kareem passed him.

The youngest player to score 10,000 points was—who else?—LeBron James, who was 23 years and 59 days old when he reached the milestone against the Celtics on Feb. 27, 2008. He broke the record set by Kobe Bryant in ’03 (24 years, 193 days).

Here’s a funny coincidence about LeBron and Michael Jordan: Both were playing through injuries when they scored their 10,000th point. James sprained his ankle in the first half against the Celtics but gutted it out in the second half and scored 26. Jordan had bruised his knee the night before, and his availability for the next night’s game against the Sixers was in doubt, but he scored 33 points to reach exactly 10,000 for his career.

“He played basically on one leg,” Bulls coach Doug Collins said after the game. “Any other guard would have taken the night off.”

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