The Georgetown Sophomore Bump

For the Georgetown Hoyas to succeed in 2015-16, they’ll need significant production from their sophomore class. In Isaac Copeland, L.J. Peak, Paul White and Tre Campbell, the Hoyas have a quartet who showed ample promise as freshmen, playing key roles in a Hoyas team that reached the Round of 32 in the NCAA tournament before losing to Utah.

But that team featured Mikael Hopkins, Joshua Smith and Jabril Trawick, all of whom have moved on. The sophomores will need to pick up the slack. The good news is that at Georgetown, under John Thompson III, the biggest leap in performance usually comes between freshman and sophomore campaigns.

“They’re going to have to make a huge jump,” Thompson III said of his sophomores last month on Big East Media Day. “And I’m going to have to put probably unfair expectations on them. We’re going to need our sophomores to perform as seniors if we are to accomplish our goals this season. We’re going to need them to be our leaders, to make plays. So I think they’re ready for that. They understand that, and they embrace it.”

The Georgetown sophomore bump is present in the team’s best player, senior D’Vauntes Smith-Rivera. Smith-Rivera played starter’s minutes from the beginning of his freshman year, and posted a respectable 15.5 Player Efficiency Rating that year. But in his sophomore season, that jumped to 23.0. This was only partially due to a usage increase—his assist, steal and block percentages all went up, while his turnover percentage went down. In his junior year, Smith-Rivera maintained his excellence, but PER remained virtually the same, at 23.4. All the growth had come between the freshman and sophomore seasons.

“I think it’s the work that you put in,” Smith-Rivera said last month of the phenomenon. “It’s not only focusing on your individual game, you want to help the team as well. I think we instill that in the new guys. As a freshman, you try to figure out where you belong, what you’re supposed to be doing. I think after that freshman year, you’re more aware of what you’re supposed to do. Things just flow better after that.”

The examples extend well beyond Smith-Rivera at Georgetown. The career of Otto Porter is the gold standard for this jump, with Porter increasing his PER from 21.3 to 27.3, and leading the Hoyas to a Big East regular season title and two seed in the NCAA tournament.

“Ooh, I hope one of them has an Otto-type sophomore year,” Thompson III said. “We’re all going to be happy if that happens. But I don’t think it is a template. Otto’s was special. Otto didn’t make the all-rookie team in the Big East as a freshman, to player of the year, as a sophomore, in the country. But that also shows, some of our coaches sometimes make mistakes.” Thompson has a point—Porter’s freshman PER ranked ninth in the entire conference.

But that Porter-led team experienced a similar sophomore leap from Greg Whittington, who went from 10.4 to 17.5 in PER before missing the second half of the season, and enjoyed the continued presence of junior Nate Lubick, whose PER had jumped from 11.5 to 14.4 in his sophomore year, then remained largely static at 15.1 his junior year.

The same thing happened for future NBAers Hollis Thompson—12.9 PER freshman year, 19.9 sophomore year, 19.1 junior year—and four-year standout Markel Starks, whose PER, despite virtually identical usage, went from 2.5 freshman year to 11.7 sophomore year. Starks had another level, 16.1 junior year, but sophomore year, statistically, was clearly the season he became a viable contributor.

So to have a team of sophomores that already set a solid baseline standard—for reference, Peak’s PER was 11.1, Campbell’s 12.1, White’s 12.6 and Copeland’s 15.4—it provides more than a little hope that the Hoyas are about to break out, perhaps beyond the consensus that places them around the bottom of the top 25.

“I thought I was going to be better than I was my freshman year,” Copeland said last month. “When I came in, it was a little rough. I had to learn a little bit. But eventually, I felt like I was able to show my ability a little bit more. Now I realize a little bit more how to do that from the start.”

For his part, Thompson isn’t quite sure why this happens to his teams.

“I don’t know, and I’m doing what I shouldn’t be doing with microphones in front of me, which is I’m thinking that through as I talk,” Thompson said, smiling. “Sophomore year, they have a sense of how hard it is to be successful. They have a sense of what coach wants. And then they get back to focusing, relaxing and playing. My coach, Coach [Pete] Carril [of Princeton] used to say, ‘Freshman stumble around like a drunken sailor.’ We’ve had some special freshmen—Greg Monroe, Jeff Green, even D’Vauntes as a freshman—there’s no adaptation, there’s no adjustment process. But a lot of freshman are trying to figure it out. By sophomore year, they’re just playing. So I hope you’re right, because we have four freshmen who played significant minutes last year, and are going to be at the core of what we do this year. And I hope they all make that big leap. And in looking at how they all went about their spring/summer/fall, I think they’re poised to do that.”