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Brown
Coach Jesse Agel inserted Garrett Leffelman into the starting lineup a couple of weeks ago in an effort to jump-start the Brown offense. The junior guard has made his coach look like a wise man for that move.
Leffelman is coming off a 30-point week, but his production goes beyond the sheer total. He gives the Bears another player who can carry the team for brief stretches when he gets on a roll, joining Matt Mullery and Peter Sullivan, and perhaps Tucker Halpern as well.
On Feb. 12, Leffelman scored the first 14 points of the game for the Bears against Dartmouth. Though he cooled down and the Big Green adjusted after that, the early spurt was enough to give the team the edge early in what would become its second Ivy League victory of the season.
He bested that the following night against Harvard. Though the Bears would wind up on the short end of an 81-67 score, Leffelman set his career high with 16 points and went 6-for-9 from the field.
In all, Leffelman has been double figures in four of his eight Ivy League games this season, and he scored nine points in another. That offensive burst hasn’t translated into many wins, but it has helped keep Brown competitive in a deceptively difficult league.
Columbia
Columbia has the strong start thing down cold. It’s what happens afterward that needs work.
The Lions started off on fire at Princeton on Feb. 12, jumping out to a 22-11 lead and looking like a team capable of handing the Tigers their first Ivy League loss. But Princeton rebounded to score 13 of the next 18, trailed by just three at the half and went on to cruise past the visitors after intermission and send Columbia to a 55-45 defeat.
Columbia followed a similar early pattern against Penn the following night. Playing a team that had just shocked Cornell, the Lions quickly led 14-5, increased the lead to 15 and still led by eight at halftime. But again, the lead withered, and with seven minutes to go, the Quakers were ahead.
This time, however, Columbia regrouped and earned a hard-fought 66-62 win. Even without senior guard Patrick Foley, sidelined indefinitely with a shoulder injury, and with Noruwa Agho largely shut down, the Lions found a way to win in one of the toughest road environments in the Ivy League.
With a 3-5 conference record entering the week, Columbia isn’t a contender to win the conference. But if the Penn game represents a sign that the Lions are becoming strong finishers in addition to fast starters, Columbia could prove to be a spoiler in the last three weeks of the season.
Cornell
Once again, the eyes of Ivy League fans will be on the Cornell-Harvard matchup, as the two flashiest contenders for the conference title meet for the second and final time this season in Cambridge, Mass.
The matchup would have seemed to be less meaningful a week ago, since Cornell beat the Crimson by 36 at home and had a two-game lead in the standings. But a Big Red upset loss at Penn on Feb. 12, at the same time Harvard was slipping past Yale in overtime, means that Harvard can draw even with the Big Red and put pressure on one-loss Princeton by defending its home court.
Moreover, not only does the Big Red no longer have the aura of invincibility that it did a week ago—losing to a Penn team that entered the weekend with three wins all season—it now finds itself mired in a bona-fide shooting slump.
Entering the Harvard-Dartmouth weekend, Cornell hasn’t broken the 35 percent barrier in 3-point shooting in the past three games, the longest streak of poor long-range shooting in more than two years. It missed 19 of its 29 attempts in the loss to Penn, never getting untracked from beyond the arc. Princeton effectively took away the perimeter, holding the Big Red to just eight 3-point attempts all night.
Cornell made two of those, one of which was the Ryan Wittman shot that gave the Big Red a six-point lead and what proved to be critical breathing room over the final two seconds. Wittman’s shot in such a key spot shows that the team isn’t afraid to hoist long-range shots, regardless of whether they have been failing or not.
But it’s a big difference between having a multi-dimensional offense, with NCAA field-goal percentage leader Jeff Foote on the inside and Wittman and the shooters on the outside, and another to be limited to one portion of the court. The Big Red are still dangerous when either the inside or the outside offense isn’t working, but it is vulnerable when it loses one facet. It proved that over the course of a weekend that could easily have seen the team go 0-for-the-road-trip.
Dartmouth
The Big Green is a team running out of time if it hopes to avoid going 0-for-the-Ivy League this season.
It does have an advantage, however, in that four of its final six Ivy League games take place at home.
All four of the Big Green’s wins this season have come at home, and it has been a relatively solid team there in conference play. It fell to a very good Harvard team by four points, and lost by just a basket to Penn. The only team that handled Dartmouth easily was Princeton, as the Tigers earned a 16-point win.
Perhaps the home crowd will add to the team’s drive in key spots. The Big Green haven’t been terrible under interim coach Mark Graupe, but nor has the team been able to sustain results for 40 minutes, Often it starts strong and then fades down the stretch, as it showed at Yale on Feb. 13 when it had an eight-point lead at halftime only to get outscored 40-19 after intermission.
With Columbia, Cornell, Yale and Brown coming to New Hampshire over the next two weeks, the Bulldogs have four chances to keep Graupe from finishing his coaching career at the school—assuming there is no rush to take the “interim” off his job title—winless in Ivy League play.
Harvard
The Crimson have an unexpected second chance to get back into the Ivy League race. Thanks to Penn’s upset of first-place Cornell on Feb. 12 and the Big Red’s subsequent win at Princeton the following day, Harvard stood just one game behind Cornell and Princeton in the standings, and it gets the chance for revenge against both teams over the final three weeks of the season.
To make that happen, Harvard will need senior guard Jeremy Lin to continue to have an Ivy League Player of the Year type of season. Whether it comes from scoring points or finding his teammates who can, Lin will need to be at the top of his game to get his banged-up team past quality Ivy opponents.
Ivy League coaches have four years worth of film on the senior, and the defenses he is seeing now reflect that. Teams are determined not to let Lin beat them with his shot, and he isn’t getting the looks he often saw in nonconference play.
That puts pressure on him to find his teammates, and on those teammates to make opponents pay for mistakes. Against Brown on Feb. 13, Lin was held to a season-low five points and was hounded all over the court, not even getting a shot off in the first half. But he had six second-half assists to lead his team past a pesky Bears squad.
Even with Lin getting pestered on offense, the Crimson can still score—especially off its bench. Tommy Amaker has gone to a defense-first starting lineup, which means Oliver McNally and Christian Webster now come off the bench. When Harvard struggles to score early, the reserves now provide the offensive firepower that had been lacking off the bench.
But the big test is yet to come. Cornell comes to Cambridge on Feb. 19 in a game Harvard has to win to have a realistic chance at the conference title. Regardless of the defense that the Big Red offers to shut down Lin, he and the rest of the Crimson will have to be ready to respond in a way they were not when the teams first met in Ithaca.
Penn
Penn might have a poor record, but the Quakers have shown that on any given day, they can play as well as any of the Ancient Eight.
The Quakers were the only team through the first half of the conference season to beat Cornell. Not only did they beat the Big Red, they won convincingly, eliminating the aura of invincibility from the two-time defending champs with a 15-point victory at home.
What Penn hasn’t been able to do is to sustain momentum. The victory over Cornell was one of the few times Penn has played a complete game all season, and those lapses are what has kept the team from being an Ivy League contender.
The Quakers faced arch-rival Princeton on Feb. 16, in front of a raucous home crowd hungry for another huge victory. But Penn gave up a 9-0 run to fall behind 13-4 early, and it never got even again.
It also started slowly against Columbia in the previous game, and it fell by four to the Lions. The inability to build on the victory over the Big Red means that any thought of the Quakers rebounding from their poor nonconference record to contend in the Ivy League didn’t last past the halfway point of the season, but as they showed against Cornell, they can be a factor in the league race by playing the spoiler.
Princeton
For about 24 hours, Princeton sat alone in first place in the Ivy League, and for most of Feb. 13, the Tigers looked to be a decent bet to finish the weekend that way as well. But a heartbreaking home loss to Cornell left the team exactly where it was seven days ago—tied for first in the loss column atop the conference standings.
The Tigers were expected to be in a battle of the Ivy League’s unbeaten teams, but Cornell didn’t pick up its end of the bargain, losing on Feb. 12 at Penn. The Tigers definitely proved that the notion of a focused Big Red team running roughshod through the conference was very premature, as Princeton took Cornell’s best shot and hung with the visitors for 40 minutes.
In the end, however, the Tigers came up just short—or more accurately, just long. A Douglas Davis 3-pointer that would have tied the game in the final seconds hit the back iron, and the Big Red escaped the hostile environment of Jadwin Gym with a three-point victory.
Lost in that result, however, was the breakout performance of Davis. A Tigers team that has lacked offensive firepower in recent years found its go-to-guy against Cornell, and it went to him repeatedly down the stretch.
Davis scored 18 of Princeton’s final 22 points and finished with 20. The only thing that could stop him was the clock, as he had to rush the final shot to beat the buzzer.
Though it was a brilliant performance in defeat, it was also costly. Princeton came within inches of controlling its own destiny and ending the weekend with a two-game lead on everyone in the conference. Instead it’s tied with Cornell atop the standings, and it will head to Ithaca for the rematch in a couple of weeks.
Yale
One thing about the Ivy League is that there is no time to linger over disappointments. A devastating Friday loss has to be forgotten quickly in order to avoid another defeat on Saturday.
That was in effect in New Haven last weekend. The Bulldogs dropped a crushing game in overtime to arch-rival Harvard on Feb. 12, falling 82-79. Harvard forced the extra session with a free throw with less than two seconds to play, when Oliver McNally was tapped by Yale’s Porter Braswell and the referee was quick with the whistle.
Yale then came out sluggishly against a Dartmouth squad that was winless in Ivy League play, trailing by eight at the half and 10 with 14 minutes to play. With the post-Harvard malaise slowing his starters, coach James Jones went deep into his bench to try to spark the Bulldogs into avoiding an embarrassing loss to the Big Green.
Raffi Mantilla hadn’t played more than seven minutes in an Ivy League game all season, and his field-goal total for Yale’s first seven games was one basket on two attempts, both of which came against Brown on Jan. 22. But he saw 16 minutes against Dartmouth and was a bundle of energy, scoring five points and adding two rebounds, a steal, and a blocked shot.
Meanwhile, Rhett Anderson had totaled just seven minutes in league play all season, and had five DNPs, including the Feb. 12 game against Harvard. But he was pressed into service when Josh Davis went down with an apparent knee injury, and he had four points and four rebounds in 10 minutes.
To be sure, it wasn’t just the new faces who made the difference. Michael Sands had 20 points against the Big Green, while Greg Mangano added 12 and Alex Zampier had 11. But it was the play of the fresh-legged and enthusiastic reserves that helped the crushing Feb. 12 loss from contributing to what would have been an additional disappointment the following day.
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Intro by Bill Bradley.