1972–73 Georgetown Hoyas men's basketball team

1972-73 Georgetown Hoyas men's basketball
Conference	Independent
1972-73 record	12–14
Head coach	John Thompson, Jr. (1st year)
Assistant coach	Bill Stein (1st year)
Assistant coach	George Leftwich (1st year)
Captain	Game captains
Home arena	McDonough Gymnasium
Seasons ← 1971–72 1973–74 →

The 1972–73 Georgetown Hoyas men's basketball team represented Georgetown University during the 1972-73 NCAA Division I college basketball season. John Thompson, Jr., coached them in his first season as head coach. The team was an independent and played its home games at McDonough Gymnasium on the Georgetown campus in Washington, D.C.. It finished the season with a record of 12-14 – a significant improvement over the previous season's record – was not ranked in the Top 20 in the Associated Press Poll or Coaches' Poll at any time, and had no post-season play.

The 29-year-old Thompson was only the third African-American head coach in the history of NCAA Division basketball and was the first to take charge of a major college basketball program. He had been a star player for Washington, D.C.'s Archbishop Carroll High School and for Providence College, had played for two successful seasons with the Boston Celtics in the National Basketball Association, and then had returned to Washington, D.C., to coach St. Anthony's High School to a record of 122-28 in six seasons.

At Georgetown, Thompson inherited a team that had gone 3-23 the previous season, the culmination of a 25-year stretch of mostly undistinguished basketball at Georgetown. Although the team had appeared in the National Invitation Tournament in 1953 and 1970, between the 1947-48 season and the end of the previous season Georgetown had posted an overall record under .500 and its total of 296 wins during those 25 seasons was the lowest among the 32 Catholic universities playing Division I college basketball in the United States. The team also had had no NCAA Tournament appearances since 1943.

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