PROVIDENCE, R.I. – The Ivy League race got more interesting on Saturday night.
With Brown’s convincing 75-65 win over Princeton, the showdown between Princeton and Harvard on March 5 just got a little bigger. If things hold to form – and the Bears’ win over the Tigers is just the latest example that one should not assume as much – that game will be between two one-loss teams in the league and very likely determine the champion.
Harvard has a half-game lead due to having played more games, but the Crimson and Tigers are even in the all-important loss column. Many have pointed to the March 5 game as having NCAA Tournament implications, and that may well stand up. But assuming as much isn’t a good idea, something both coaches would surely agree on as they try to go one game at a time.
One need only look at the past two weekends for evidence of this. A week earlier, Harvard had their hands full with a Yale team that could have been right in the thick of things with a win in Cambridge, then trailed by 22 at halftime to a Brown team that didn’t have its best player. This past weekend, Brown had that player back, and Peter Sullivan played almost like he hadn’t missed time, especially in Saturday night’s win. They figure to have him when Harvard makes the trip to Providence next Friday.
Brown is showing signs of progress, with Saturday’s win being the latest example. The biggest thing they did was put two halves together, something they didn’t do at Harvard.
“We’ve been getting off to really good starts,” said Sullivan, who scored a game-high 26 points, including going 16-16 from the foul line. “We just haven’t been able to sustain it the whole game. Today we really played a great second half. It got a little close, but we stayed composed and we finished up the game.”
The Bears are the next opponent for the Crimson, and with Sullivan back and the Bears playing the most complete defensive game of the season on Saturday, they don’t figure to be a pushover. Princeton can attest to it. The Crimson then have to go to Yale on the back end, and the Bulldogs are capable of clipping them on their home floor. For the matchup with the Tigers to mean anything, though, they will likely need to take both games, as Princeton returns home to take on rebuilding Cornell and fading Columbia.
Then again, the Tigers didn’t exactly hold up their end of the bargain on Saturday night. The offense gets a lot of mention, and they struggled at that end, but it was at the defensive end that Princeton lost it. Brown shot 56 percent from the field in the first half and just under 49 percent for the game. The Bears didn’t miss a beat when foul trouble forced them to go smaller, as they played Tucker Halpern as their big man. While Halpern didn’t have the easiest time at the defensive end, he was another ball-handler and caused matchup problems en route to handing out seven assists to make the offense go.
“We were struggling to keep guys in front of us, our help defense wasn’t what it needed to be, and we’ve got to own up for that,” Princeton head coach Sydney Johnson said. “We’ve been pretty good defensively for a while now.”
If Harvard and Princeton win out up to the game on March 5, Harvard will have a little more momentum on their side, if nothing else. By then, the Crimson would have an eight-game winning streak, and of course, they would have the game at home. But Princeton won both meetings last season and the earlier meeting this season, which works in their favor.
Most figured that the meeting between Harvard and Princeton on the last weekend of the regular season would be for all the marbles. That is likely to remain the case, although most figured that the end result might be a tie in the loss column. Instead, an outright Ivy title may be on the line, although the Tigers will still have one more game at the Palestra against their arch-rivals. One thing that is for certain is that the game could take on a different meaning after what happened in Providence on Saturday night.
