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Posted Saturday, March 12, 8:23 p.m.
Updated 11:13 p.m.
CINCINNATI – Go ahead GW men’s basketball fans, party like it’s 1999. Pardon the Prince reference, but after defeating St. Joseph’s in the Atlantic 10 Tournament finals Saturday evening, the Colonials are headed to the NCAA Tournament for the first time in six years.
By speeding up the game in the second half and fighting off Pat Carroll’s blazingly steady three-point stroke, GW out-gunned the Hawks, prevailing 76-67 in front of a few thousand bipartisan fans at the U.S. Bank Arena.
To capture its first A-10 Tournament title, coach Karl Hobbs’ squad needed huge performances from its elder statesman – and that’s exactly what it got. Junior Omar Williams scored 20 points (including 13-for-17 at the free throw line to go along with 10 rebounds) and senior T.J. Thompson closed out his conference career with 15 big points.
The win was extra sweet for Thompson, who in his final year at GW was named to the All-Tournament team and will make a trip to the Big Dance for the first time in his career. This is the first time the Colonials have received an automatic tourney bid.
The compact senior guard was the last of his teammates to cut a ceremonial snippet of the championship net, taking the finished product and putting around his neck. When asked how long he’d wear the stringy necklace, he smiled.
“What?” he said loudly. “I’m not taking this thing off for the rest of the week.”
At the post-game press conference, junior forward Pops Mensah-Bonsu (six points, All-Tournament team member), appeared relaxed, as if all the pressure, all the talk of the A-10 being a one-bid league, just went “poof” after the win.
“When (T.J.) and I came in, we were at the bottom of the conference,” he said. “Now we’re at the top. It feels really good that we put our own destiny in our hands.”
For fourth-year coach Hobbs, the win signified a complete 180 of a program which was at its nadir before he arrived. After two sub-.500 seasons in his first two years, his Colonials put together an 18-12 and 22-7 campaigns back-to-back.
Still, the ever reserved Hobbs refused to put his team on the same tier as the higher profile programs of the A-10, which may not get any at-large teams into the NCAA Tournament this year.
“I think the true measure of success, the thing I’m chasing as a coach, and the thing we’re chasing as a program, is excellence,” he said. “When you talk about St. Joe’s, Xavier, or Dayton, you see the NBA jerseys on the walls. That’s what we’re trying to chase.”
The post-game scene was raucous for the players, coaches, administrators and GW fans in attendance that made the trip to Cincy. Cigar toting Director of Athletics Jack Kvancz was even spotted giving former GW coach turned ESPN color commentator Mike Jarvis a high five when the game ended.
Lost in the shuffle was the fact that the Colonials did not exactly run away with the trophy, as Mensah-Bonsu mockingly tried to do as his teammates celebrated.
The Hawks were tough, and Carroll (25 points) almost single-handedly kept his team in it down the stretch. Sophomore guards Carl Elliott and J.R. Pinnock kept the Tournament’s Most Outstanding Player on lock-down for the first half, limiting him to five points before the break.
Then, like clockwork, Carroll’s bee-bees began to plink through the net enroute to 20 second half points. However, it was one key miss that created a small opening that the Colonials explosively tore through.
Leading 51-49 with less than six minutes to go in the game, Carroll took a pass on the wing, and launched a trey.
The shot looked so smooth, so soft, so true – it surely would give the Hawks the lead. It spun and dipped down, but it popped out, and Omar Williams snatched the rebound.
The freakish miss from Carroll led to a 7-0 run that gave GW a 58-49 lead, and essentially the championship. The spurt included a Mensah-Bonsu jump hook, a Thompson three-pointer, and was capped off by two Williams’ free throws. Williams and fellow junior Mike Hall (six points) hit key free throws late to seal the victory.
Before the Colonials landed a kill shot, they put together what was perhaps an even more impressive run. After an ugly first half in which the teams shooting percentages combined totaled just over 56 percent (32.1 for GW, 24.1 for St. Joe’s), the Hawks looked like they would take control in the second.
GW opened an 18-11 lead with 8:40 left in the first half, but could not pull away, as St. Joe’s quickly came back with a 9-2 run. Still GW led 22-20 at the break, and both teams battled hard in the first five minutes after intermission. After taking its first lead of the game (33-31 at 15:30), St. Joe’s went on an 11-6 run that Carroll keyed with nine points on three consecutive Hawk possessions.
After a Jones tip-in gave the Hawks a 44-37 lead with 10:22 left in the game, GW finally woke up on offense, as a hard-fought short jumper by Elliott, a steal/dunk combo by Pinnock, and Thompson’s first trey of the game knotted the score at 44 all with 8:55 left.
Then, after a bit more back-and-forth, the Colonials delivered the back breaker. Unlike GW’s loss to St. Joe’s on March 1, the Colonials were able to fight back from a sizable deficit and actually get over the hump.
“That showed how much we’ve matured. Not just from last year to this year, from this year until now,” said Pinnock, who scored 15 points on the night. “There were times earlier this year, I mean the last St. Joe’s game, we got down we cut the lead to three, but they went back up by nine. But with T.J. stepping up and Omar stepping up, it just shows our maturity.”
When asked what type of motivational speech he delivered before the game, Hobbs smiled and said he said he might have to “save that one for a book.”
“I just told them (before the game), ‘It’s our time. It’s our time. Communicate,” he said. “Talk to each other. And play with confidence. Know that you are going to play that way.”
In the locker room, all the players seemed relaxed, without their first round tourney opponent on their minds.
“I don’t even know how to put it in words,” Pinnock said. “I got a little emotional. With all the bubble talk, we felt we deserved it. It wasn’t even a question.”
