CAMBRIDGE, Mass. – As young as Harvard was last year, with a ballyhooed class of freshmen, the Crimson have an even younger unit this season. There are three seniors and no juniors on the roster, and a number of players in the rotation are freshmen. One sophomore, Andrew Van Nest, may as well be a freshman after missing all of last season with an injury.
In light of that, how the Crimson would respond to not playing well en route to a loss. The answer: just fine, as they beat New Hampshire 78-60 on Wednesday in a game that wasn’t even that close.
“I thought it was a really good bounce-back game for us,” said head coach Tommy Amaker.
The Crimson have started the season well, improving to 4-1 with the win. Only one win has not been by a double-digit margin, a game that they won in triple overtime over William & Mary on a buzzer-beating three-pointer by Jeremy Lin. But just two days before Wednesday, the Crimson dropped their first game of the year at Army. They didn’t play well offensively and came up just short.
That meant that Wednesday’s game would be a test, especially with the trap of being right before the Thanksgiving holiday. But the Crimson broke the game open around the midway point of the first half and poured it on in the early minutes of the second, leading by as many as 32.
“We were focusing on just coming out,” said freshman guard Christian Webster, who scored 15 points in his first career start. “In the Army game, we didn’t play our game.”
The Crimson got the job done defensively, holding the Wildcats to 19 percent shooting in the first half and not letting them get second shots. They out-rebounded them 22-10 in the opening stanza and held a 39-25 edge at the end of the game. For the game, they scored 19 points off 13 turnovers. That shows how they translated the defense into offense, as they shot just under 61 percent from the field in the first half.
“Our defense leads to our offense, and I think we can’t allow a team to shoot 50 to 60 percent and then think we’re going to shoot 50 percent,” said Amaker. “I think there’s a reason we were able to shoot 60 percent, because we got a lot of high-percentage shots because our defense was tremendous.”
New Hampshire struggled on offense but did get to the line often in the half, which means the Crimson could have been even better on defense. The Wildcats were 14-22 from the line, so they didn’t take full advantage.
Two key veterans on this young team, Lin and Oliver McNally, came up big for the Crimson. They lean on Lin as the senior leader and a player who impacts games in a number of ways, and he scored a game-high 18 points and grabbed a team-high seven boards on Wednesday. McNally had nine assists with no turnovers, orchestrating the offense nicely. As both play in the backcourt and have the ball in their hands often, their significance to this team is magnified.
McNally is a competitor that Amaker can hang his hat on. Lin has a similar competitive nature and sometimes can put a lot of pressure on himself, especially when the team needs a spark. As such, how he responded following a bad game at Army -he was 0-6 from the field and had eight turnovers – was going to be a key for the team.
“We ask him to do everything, and he has to be a rock,” Amaker said of Lin. “When things aren’t going well, he can’t look like he’s coming unglued. None of our older guys can. We can’t expect the young kids to respond if our older guys are coming unglued and showing signs of frustration.”
The young players certainly responded on Wednesday. Besides Webster, Dee Giger had 11 points off the bench, Kyle Casey had six points, four rebounds and two assists in 11 minutes, and at times sophomore Andrew Van Nest looked better than his stat line of three points and four boards in 13 minutes would suggest. Van Nest missed all of last season with a shoulder injury, so he may as well be a freshman on the court. Brandyn Curry didn’t have a stat line that jumped out, but played 24 minutes. In all, freshmen played 93 of the 200 minutes.
As was the case last year, Amaker knows that the freshmen are going to have ups and downs. But with several likely to be counted on for key minutes, their play will impact the bottom line.
“At one point, I looked out there and I think we had four freshmen and Van Nest, so it’s like a five-freshman crew,” Amaker reflected. “I like what these kids have been able to do thus far. I’m very pleased with their progression, and I also know it’s a roller coaster with freshmen.”
Only Webster started on Wednesday among the freshmen, so the Crimson are mainly using the younger players in reserve roles. Webster started because Max Kenyi, normally a starter on the wing, tore his MCL against Army. With Kenyi likely out for a while, Webster figures to get more starts, but he’ll be the only freshman in the starting lineup.
The young Crimson responded well following their first loss of the season. If they continue to respond to losses this way, they should be in good shape for much of the season.
