Sad news came down Monday evening when it was announced that junior Isaac Copeland would transfer from Georgetown at semester’s end. Once the crown jewel of Georgetown’s 2014 recruiting class, Copeland will leave the Hilltop a diminished player, lacking both the promise he brought as a freshman and the development that never arrived.
Copeland’s career as a Hoya, and the circumstances of his transfer, are awfully hard to separate from the trajectory of Georgetown basketball over the past several years. Copeland committed in the early months of 2013, when he was a high-school prospect on the rise. At the time, Hoya forward Otto Porter was turning in a virtuoso performance as the conference player of the year, leading Georgetown to a regular-season conference championship, a 25-victory season, and a Big-East-closing rout of Syracuse on the very day that Copeland visited campus.