Around the Ivies: Big Weekend for Yale, Princeton in Ivy Title Pursuit

Before getting to the basketball, I want to begin this column with a moment of mourning for the three University of North Carolina—Chapel Hill students who were shot Wednesday—Shaddy Barakat, Yusor Mohammad, and Razan Mohammad Abu-Salha. My thoughts and prayers are with the deceased and their families.

With that, let’s return to Ivy League basketball, dear reader.

Last weekend, Harvard swept Brown and Yale by a grand total of four points, further evoking shades of the 2012 team with a gritty win in Payne Whitney to ascend to the top of the Ivy League. The Crimson plays only two of its final eight contests on the road and appear to have senior wing and reigning Ivy League Player of the Year Wesley Saunders (24.5 ppg last weekend) in peak form.

Yale travels this weekend to Princeton, who blew a golden chance to separate itself from the league’s middle tier—namely, the Gentleman’s C’s—by giving up a 26-0 run to Cornell. Last year, the Bulldogs roared back from a double-digit halftime lead at home for a one-point overtime win, squashing any hopes Princeton had of making the NCAA Tournament. Two weeks later, the Tigers returned the favor in Jadwin with an 11-point win that put Yale’s title hopes on life support.

Princeton’s precarious position illustrates the danger of the Ivy League, where the conference often becomes a two-horse race after the third or fourth weekend.

No league champion since 1980 has finished with five or more losses. For all the talk about an extremely deep Ivy League, Harvard and Yale have opened up a two-game lead in the win column over the field.

With road sweeps difficult to come by, a team like Princeton will need to be nearly perfect at home the rest of the way and win in at least one at Cambridge and New Haven to have a realistic shot at the title.

A quick exercise in binomial probability can help us see how difficult this is. Even if Princeton—who rates as the fourth-best team in the league, via KenPom—has a 60 percent chance of winning each of its remaining games, it has only a 23 percent chance of finishing 7-2 or better. With extremely optimistic projections, those are tough odds.

CORNELL AT DARTMOUTH

Ah, the first of the Ivy League’s biannual color-fights. This is arguably the league’s least relevant matchup; the Big Red and the Big Green have only finished in the league’s top half in the same year once since 1980. Since John Wall personally squashed Cornell’s 2009 blaze of glory, neither has finished among the Ancient Eight’s top five.

Both teams are frisky this year—Cornell consistently and Dartmouth in spurts. Both have used titanic runs to take out a league elite (Princeton and Harvard, respectively) while failing to come to play consistently. Both have the ignominy of double-digit losses to Penn on their schedule, wounds that cut deep.

But don’t just take that from me. The Friday loss so badly upset the sports writers of the Cornell Daily Sun that they didn’t write about it until Wednesday. If the Big Red lose here, the snow might melt before news gets out.

Pick: Dartmouth

YALE AT PENN

Coming off its first adversity of conference play, Yale should listen to Frank Kaminsky.

No, I am not referring to the Wisconsin center—the droopy-eyed Naismith award candidate and self-proclaimed co-founder of the #DirtyDub. I refer to the “other” Frank Kaminsky—the greatest basketball player in Yale history. This Kaminsky, the centerpiece of the last Yale team to make the tournament, proclaimed that his Bulldogs “weren’t afraid of any team.... We never cared about how we won our games, as long as we won.”

The Yale faithful would do well to remember such lessons—and perspective. Their current squad, which took out Connecticut and appears unafraid of its Crimson rival, embodies Kaminsky’s words as well as any in recent memory. The team will remember that last year a 5-0 Harvard team got outplayed start to finish by a 4-1 Yale team at home, only to come back in the final week and stomp the Bulldogs on the road.

The journey back to the top starts with a snoozer in Philly.

Pick: Yale

BROWN AT PRINCETON

The Bears came off the mat by nearly completing the impressive home sweep of Harvard and Dartmouth. After Leland King’s departure, the team has massive Ewing Theory potential due to the outstanding play of sophomore guard Tayvon Blackmon. With Rafael Maia and Cedric Kuakamensah in the frontcourt, Brown can dominate opponents inside.

Against Princeton, however, the Bears must take care of the ball. That Brown managed a win against Dartmouth playing hot potato (19 turnovers) is darn impressive, but that won’t happen against a better team.

Pick: Princeton

COLUMBIA AT HARVARD

Before the season, this was circled as the game where Columbia rode its upperclassmen back into the top tier of the Ivy League. The Lions have been knocking on the door for some time—beating Yale by 16 at home last year before taking out Princeton in Jadwin. It returns to face its nemesis; Harvard has fared poorly in Levien the last two years, but has won the two home games by an average of 19 points.

Columbia—which takes more than 46 percent of its shots from three—has the league’s best offense while Harvard boasts the league’s best defense. Lions coach Kyle Smith compared Harvard to “a smaller version of Kentucky” this week. Smith’s team nearly beat Kentucky at Rupp this year before fading away, and a similar result is likely in Boston.

Pick: Harvard

YALE AT PRINCETON

This game feels like a kitchen sink game for the Tigers after Princeton blew a golden chance to sweep the Gentleman’s C’s last weekend. Both teams come to Cambridge in the next three weeks, where Harvard has won 27 of 29 contests; a loss here will push either into major desperation mode.

Pick: Princeton

BROWN AT PENN

Compelling your significant other to watch this game on Valentine’s Day would be relationship suicide on the order of making your six-month anniversary present a Qdoba burrito. Watching it alone might be even sadder—think post-midnight delivery orders from the Kong.

Pick: Brown

COLUMBIA AT DARTMOUTH

Other than the scintillating matchups of arguably the Ancient Eight’s best two point guards—Alex Mitola and Maodo Lo—this game is a reminder of what was once a bitter rivalry. I’m not referring to any chippy play between the two teams, but the past vitriol spewed by the Columbia Spectator. Hardly a decade ago, the Spectator ran a column called “CU vs. Cow School: The New Rivalry.” In addition to quoting a Columbia student who described Hanover as “a scene from the Shining,” the article’s writer argues that “[Dartmouth] is hardly even a safety school…their admissions process is about as selective as my Denver community college.” Oh my, Howard, this must be where those danged Ivy League snob stereotypes begin.

Pick: Columbia

CORNELL AT HARVARD

Through six Ivy League games, Cornell has proved it can hang with the heavyweights of the league. The Big Red beat Princeton last Saturday and gave Yale trouble down the stretch despite a terrible six-of-20 shooting night from star forward Shonn Miller. Cornell has an impressive top-75 defense, with Miller the fulcrum in the middle around which it all operates. The big man averages a combined 3.5 steals and blocks a night for a team that holds its opponents to under 38 percent shooting a game.

The problem for the Big Red is that they face a mirror image in Harvard. The Crimson has long stretches where it does not score the ball effectively, often asking junior co-captain Siyani Chambers or Saunders to bail it out late in the shot clock. The Harvard defense—12th in the nation, per KenPom—is another story, with five players often moving on a string. Harvard closes out on opposing shooters extremely well (31.6 opponent three-point field goal percentage) and cleans up on the boards (+4.1 rebounding percentage). Harvard has struggled in the past against teams that press, which Cornell will surely do, but the Big Red likely doesn't have enough offense to get past the hosts here.

Pick: Harvard

—Staff writer David Freed can be reached at david.freed@thecrimson.com. Follow him on Twitter at @CrimsonDPFreed.