Georgetown 61
Rutgers 56
It has become as formulaic as a slasher-horror flick.
The victim tries to elude the monster, thwart it, trying to leave it in its slow-walking, methodically-paced dust.
But the monster continues to walk and incredibly enough it's lurking right behind the tree, waiting just around the corner to spring up on the scurrying victim in flight.
The Rutgers men's basketball team has become the victim to the monster that is the inability to close out the end of games.
The Knights' woes toward the end reflected the disturbing trend of the regular season as they fell just short of the visiting Georgetown Hoyas 61-56 Saturday night at the Louis Brown Athletic Center in front of a sold-out crowd of 8,007.
"I went to Princeton and any win in this building is a great win," Georgetown head coach John Thompson III said. "And I though it was a very good win for our guys."
The loss marks the third time in the last four games the Knights were down by four points or less in the final minute of the ballgame. In those three games, Rutgers has lost by a total of eight points.
In two of those contests, the Knights (7-12, 1-8) had a chance to win the game on a Quincy Douby three-point field goal attempt (Syracuse and St. John's).
In what has become a season-long tendency, the Hoyas (15-6, 7-3) controlled the tempo and flow of the game early.
"We haven't been able to dictate our tempo well at all this year," senior Ricky Shields said. "Some days, with the tempo the other team is playing, we're able to keep up with whatever they're doing and we play well sometimes.
"Other days, when they're slowing it up too much, then it gets us out of our tempo."
The Hoyas applied their slow-down, methodical gameplan and milked the shot clock down on a majority of the possessions. At the midway mark in the first-half, the Knights led by a score of 12-10 and eventually grabbed their largest lead of the game at eight.
But a Hoyas 14-4 run ensued, tying them then giving them the lead at 24-22 - a lead they would hold onto for the duration of the game.
For most of the game, until late in the second-half when the Knights applied a full-court press, the Knights were outhustled (11 offensive rebounds for the Hoyas) and outworked in a game they sorely needed to try to get themselves back on track.
"They outhustled us on some of those plays," Rutgers head coach Gary Waters said. "In the first half they only had three offensive rebounds and in the second-half they got eight and they were all on hustle plays."
At lot of those long-shots were due to the 2-3 zone implemented by RU, which worked in forcing the Hoyas to go 5-21 overall from behind-the-arc, but left them shorthanded on the defensive boards and it led to 15 second-chance points for the Hoyas.
One aspect of the game that was successful for the Knights was the full-court press, which led to several turnovers during a couple minute span and ignited the Knights on an 11-4 run to cut it to 54-50.
"The way to get people out of control and tempo is what we did at the end of the game in the last seven, eight minutes-pressure and press so they turn it over," Waters said. "We're going to do more of it. What do we have to lose?"
RU has until Tuesday to prepare for their rematch against in-state rivals, the Seton Hall Pirates (10-9, 2-6). Both teams reside in the bottom tier of the conference, with the Pirates holding on to the ninth-place position and a full game ahead of the Knights.
The Pirates won the first meeting of the season at Continental Airlines Arena by a final score of 74-58.
Waters said after the game on Jan. 22 that it would be a different "game" at the RAC. He still stands by that notion, even after losing nine of their past 10 games.
"We're not going to go through the motions, we're going to go out there and play hard. You have to remember, I have to keep reiterating to let you know it's going to be played hard."
Reiteration is repetition, and the formulaic horror movie that is this season continues to perpetuate itself.
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