Men’s Basketball Eyes Ivy Glory in Amaker’s 20th Season

With the trees turning to hues of orange and red as the Cambridge weather returns to its signature winter chilliness, Harvard men’s basketball is on the verge of its 116th season in what looks to be a wide-open Ivy League. Utilizing its immense raw talent and another year of experience, the Crimson might finally bring home its first Ivy League Tournament Championship since the tournament began a decade ago.

With head coach Tommy Amaker entering his 20th season at the helm of the program and four of last season’s starters returning, the program is at its strongest point in years — and people around the Ancient Eight are starting to take notice.

“Bringing as many guys back as we did, you just feel really confident in the culture and the chemistry that we have,” co-captain forward Thomas Batties II said. “When you bring in a freshman class that’s as talented as ours, that just adds fuel to the fire.”

Picked to finish second in back-to-back seasons in the Ivy League preseason poll alongside seven first-place votes — behind the 2026 tournament champion University of Pennsylvania — Harvard is in position to capitalize on its depth and make a push for its first NCAA Tournament appearance since its four straight appearances from 2012 to 2015.

Unlike the team’s path in 2015, which saw the team clinch the Ivy League title in a one-game playoff over Yale, the current path goes through the Ivy Madness Tournament, which will be played at Penn’s Palestra this season for the venue’s 100th anniversary. The winner of the four-team single-elimination tournament will become the Ivy League Champion and receive the conference’s automatic bid to the NCAA Tournament.

Last season, Amaker’s squad went into the conference tournament as the league’s two seed, losing an overtime heartbreaker to the eventual-champion Quakers. Harvard had qualified for the tournament’s first four editions before taking a five-year hiatus between 2021 and 2025, finally returning last season.

Ranked first in the Ivy League preseason poll, Penn is entering its second year under Fran McCaffery — who spent 15 years with the University of Iowa and is one of five head coaches to lead five different programs to the NCAA Tournament. The Quakers have recruited four transfers over the past two seasons, led by senior guard TJ Power — who committed to Duke as a highly-rated prospect out of high school before transferring to the University of Virginia, then Penn — who scored 44 points in the conference championship.

Despite losing three players to the portal and four of its five starters, Yale — voted third — landed junior forward Connor May ahead of this offseason, a two-time conference MVP with Washington University in St. Louis. 2026 Ivy League Player of the Year and forward Nick Townsend is spending his fifth year at Stanford. Under head coach James Jones, who ranks second all-time in the Ivy League with 236 conference wins, the Bulldogs can never be counted out of the title race.

Two former members of Stanford’s coaching staff will also be debuting in the Ancient Eight, with Eric Reveno and Brett MacConnell at Brown and Dartmouth, respectively. Both coaches come from the Kyle Smith coaching tree and employ variants of his trademark “Nerdball” approach to the game. Smith, who gained fame for his hyper-analytical approach to basketball while coaching at Columbia, now has his proteges leading four of the eight Ivy League squads, including Columbia and Cornell.

Last year, Harvard’s 10-4 conference record marked a significant turnaround for the Crimson, coming off a disappointing 2024-2025 campaign in which it missed the tournament by just one game. Going into this season, the team is more focused on internal development as it prepares for the upcoming season.

“We have some other teams in the Ivy League that are getting transfers from other schools, and they’re getting new freshmen and all that,” junior guard Robert Hinton said. “We have to focus on everything that’s happening only under our roof, and focusing on each other. I mean, that’s how we’re gonna win the league, and that’s how we’re gonna get the season started.”

Harvard returned four starters from last season, including Hinton, Batties, and junior guards Tey Barbour and Ben Eisendrath. The quartet combined to average 129.2 minutes per game in 2025, and three of them were among the top eight in minutes across the Ivy League.

Two of the four also finished last season on All-Ivy teams, including a unanimous first-team selection for Hinton and a second-team selection for Batties. Three of the returners — Hinton, Batties, and Barbour — averaged at least 12 points and four rebounds per game to rank among the Crimson’s top four across both categories last season.

The team graduated just one starter in guard Chandler Piggé ’26, a former Crimson editor, who signed a professional contract with Manchester Basketball this summer. He joined Batties on the All-Ivy Second Team, while ranking third in steals per game and minutes per game across the Ancient Eight.

All five starters had regularly played at least 34 minutes across the team’s meaningful conference games.

Harvard will also hope to return junior guard Austin Hunt, who missed most of last season with an injury and did not suit up in the exhibition. In his freshman year, Hunt earned Ivy League Rookie of the Week honors while averaging 7.8 points and 3.6 rebounds across 21.6 minutes per game.

Led by four-star recruit and three-time McDonald’s All-American Jason Singleton, the Crimson is also bringing a strong five-person freshman recruiting class to replace last year’s seniors, Piggé and guard Greg Cooper ’26.

Singleton is the highest-ranked incoming recruit in the Ivy League and Amaker’s eighth four-star recruit in 15 years, following Hinton — a former unanimous Ivy League Rookie of the Year. In the team’s exhibition against the University of Massachusetts on Oct. 23, the freshman led his team with 23 points and six rebounds across 24 minutes.

“Leadership, chemistry, and then confidence. Those are three words that we’re going to use a lot for this year for this team,” Amaker said. “I really believe that your years usually go as your veterans go, and we can’t count on or think that we’re going to be able to depend on young guys to carry you all the way through.”

“Will they have an impact? Of course, but we need that veteran leadership, the older guys to really carry this team through the course of a season,” the coach added.

Harvard is currently ranked 12th on CollegeInsider’s Mid-Major Top-25 poll, behind Penn at sixth but ahead of Princeton at 20th.

The Crimson will kick off its season against MIT at Lavieties Pavilion on Monday at 7 p.m. EDT, starting a stretch of 14 non-conference games before Ivy League play.

Just before a 16-day winter break, Harvard will play a marquee matchup on Dec. 4 against Duke, Amaker’s alma mater and where he spent nine years on the Blue Devils’ coaching staff. The game is a part of the Brotherhood Run, where Duke invites teams coached by former alumni or coaching staff.

Its only other power conference matchup will be against Boston College in mid-November, following a four-game road trip after the season opener. Harvard will then cap its second-to-last non-conference match against Saint Mary’s, which was 21st in the Associated Press coaches poll in March and 10th in the Mid-Majors poll.

—Staff writer Uy B. Pham can be reached at [email protected] or on Signal at ubp.88. Follow him on X @uybpham.

—Staff writer Connor Castañeda can be reached at [email protected].