Basketball in August?

Image courtesy of Georgetown.edu

Apparently so. 

Georgetown tipped off their extended "cultural exchange" trip to China with a 48(!) minute extravaganza against the Shanxi Zhongyu Brave Dragons at Beijing’s Olympic Sports Center.  And the Hoyas started off their (exhibition) season right with a 98-81 thumping of the Dragons.

This was clearly an international spectacular, drawing such A-listers as Joe Biden, Gary Locke and Paul Tagliabue.

This is usually the point where I write "Let's run the numbers" but those numbers are a bit hard to come by for the game.  A simple box score is all that I can find in the interwebs, so there's not much for the HP Cray II^TM to process tonight (it remains idle but alert in my mom's basement).  And, after all, it was merely an exhibition.

Let's run the numbers:

TEMPO-FREE BOX SCORE
 
.                 Visitor           Home   
.                 Georgetown        Shanxi Zhongyu         
 
Pace               79

Points             98                 81

Eff.             103.1               85.2

eFG%              49.4               47.6
TO%               21.0               23.2
OR%               36.0               25.5
FTA/FGA           16.7               55.6
FTM/FGA           10.0               33.3

Assist Rate       51.2               37.0
Block Rate        23.8                1.4
Steal Rate        13.7                1.1

2FG%              47.9               50.0
3FG%              36.8               28.6
FT%               60.0               60.0

Attempts/Poss.
2FG               0.90               0.53
3FG               0.24               0.27
FT                0.19               0.44

The score of the game would lead one to believe that this was either a defense-optional affair or a ridiculously-paced game, but neither is actually true.  The game went 48 minutes over 4 quarters rather than the standard 20-minute halves, so all the counting stats were naturally inflated.

Georgetown carried over the unusually defensive-minded Kenner League playoffs into this trip, by grabbing a ton of steals and blocking nearly 1/4 of all 2FG attempts during the game.  A strong effort on the defensive glass also helped.

Some simple player stats after the jump . . .

Player Name        Min  FTM FTA  2FGM 2FGA  3FGM 3FGA   % Poss % Shot  O Rtg   eFG%
Thompson, Hollis    20   0   0     3    6     2    4     23.4   26.7   106.9   60.0
Starks, Markel      28   0   0     6   12     1    4     23.4   30.5    89.9   46.9
Sims, Henry         25   1   3     5    8     0    0     21.6   17.1   114.7   62.5
Clark, Jason        20   2   2     3    6     2    5     27.5   29.3   110.9   54.5
Lubick, Nate        23   2   3     2    2     0    1     12.8    7.0   134.6   66.7
Porter, Otto        31   0   1     5   10     2    3     16.0   22.4   131.5   61.5
Hopkins, Mikael     27   0   0     0    6     0    0     15.0   11.9    36.0    0.0
Trawick, Jabril     22   3   3     5    8     0    1     26.9   21.8   109.4   55.6
Whittington, Greg   22   1   2     2    6     0    0     18.1   14.5    77.6   33.3
Bowen, Aaron        18   0   1     2    6     0    1     20.2   20.7    46.7   28.6
Caprio, John         4   0   0     1    1     0    0     25.1   13.3   101.3  100.0

I'm not going to draw a lot of conclusions from this game, just a couple of observations:

• Nate Lubick and Otto Porter went the low-usage / high-efficiency route for the game
• Markel Starks went the other way, leading the team in shot attempts but not scoring efficienctly
• Free throw shooting is already a concern after the first exhibition game.