Thirty Games in, Harvard is Still Marching

If the 2012-2013 Harvard basketball season started with scandal, the 2013-2014 squad started with expectations. The preseason storylines for the Crimson centered around the return, not the departure, of senior Kyle Casey and co-captain Brandyn Curry. After adding the returning All-Ivy senior talents and top-100 recruit freshman Zena Edosomwan, the murmurs were not of the team winning the Ivy League, but of going undefeated.

A year after losing four-fifths of the starting lineup to graduation or departure, the Crimson entered the 2013-2014 season with four-fifths of its starters returning, and the only loss—Christian Webster ’13—was coming back to the bench as an assistant coach. Harvard went four-deep in the frontcourt with juniors Kenyatta Smith, Jonah Travis, Steve Moundou-Missi, and Casey. If first-team All-Ivy starter Siyani Chambers sat, the team brought Curry—selected to the 2011-2012 All-Ivy League Second Team—off the bench. The remaining two projected starters? Last year’s leading scorer junior wing Wesley Saunders and the school’s best-ever three-point shooter, co-captain Laurent Rivard.

For all the talent that would take the floor, there was twice as much hype.

The Associated Press ranked the team 31st in the nation before the season’s inception. It was the unanimous selection to finish atop the league in the conference’s preseason poll—the first since the 2009 Sweet Sixteen Cornell squad to garner such honors. Others were willing to go farther. ESPN writer John Gasaway picked Harvard to make the Final Four.

“The expectations are going to be much higher,” Curry said before gameplay began. “We are going to have people coming after us this year.”

Amaker, however, was quick to disagree. Without a win on the court, Harvard’s head coach was unwilling to anoint his team. The same man who claims to never read a single “Bracketology” report during the season dismissed the hype as speculation.

“It’s assumed that whoever the favorite is [will] waltz through the league,” said Amaker prior to the season. “But it’s never happened since I’ve been a part of it.”

“We have our set identity, our set standards, and our set goals—they don’t change,” he continued. “Our players know them by heart, and we don’t compromise or negotiate with those three categories. Those are internal for us, and we’re never really worried or focusing or trying to listen to anything from the outside world.”

II. NONCONFERENCE PLAY

Five days before the Crimson took the floor for its first game against Holy Cross, it suffered its first setback. Smith, a defensive titan whose size and trustworthy hook shot had been essential to the Crimson’s run a year before, was out indefinitely. A stress reaction in his left foot had become a hairline fracture with overuse. Amaker’s preseason starting center wouldn’t return for two months.

Harvard barely missed a beat. Amaker put Casey into the starting lineup alongside Moundou-Missi, but it was Travis, the first reserve off the bench, who shined brightest in a season-opening 82-72 win over Holy Cross at the TD Garden. With 20 points and 10 rebounds in just 22 minutes of play, Travis established himself as the team’s spark plug off the bench.

“I know my job—to provide energy for the team,” Travis said after the win. “If they need me to grab rebounds, score points, or set screens, [then] that’s what I will do.”

The performance was emblematic of the two team strengths that Amaker has stressed all year: its bench and its balance. Five players finished in double digits, with the bench chipping in 31 of the team’s 82 points.

Both qualities stemmed from each player’s awareness of his role on the team. Before the season, Amaker’s staff affixed note cards to every locker detailing what each player would be counted on to do. Saunders was both the team’s best slasher and best perimeter defender. Casey was the vocal defensive leader and an effective passer from the high post.

However, Curry, dubbed the team’s “sixth starter” by Amaker, had his role interrupted by an ankle injury in the Holy Cross matchup. With Curry sporadically in and out of the lineup for the next two months, the Crimson found itself down two key players early.

Even with the Crimson’s “next man up” philosophy, the injuries took their toll in the biggest nonconference games. Harvard won three straight following the Holy Cross victory, and rolled into Boulder, Colo., in late November undefeated and confident.

The Buffaloes, which boasted potential NBA first-round draft pick Spencer Dinwiddie and an imposing front line of 6’10” Josh Scott and 6’7” Xavier Johnson, hung around the fringe of the nation’s top 25. Colorado’s victory over Kansas a couple weeks later would put it in the top 20.

The Crimson came out strong, hitting four early three-pointers en route to a quick 16-4 lead that became a 12-point halftime advantage. But with Casey in foul trouble (four fouls, 19 minutes played), Smith’s absence was keenly felt during a 14-0 Buffalo second half run. Harvard had just 20 points in the final period, and lost the game, 70-62.

From Colorado, the team flew to Anchorage for the Great Alaska Shootout. As the top seed, it expected—and, aside from a tight semifinal against Green Bay, received—little competition. Winning its three games by an average of 13.7 points, Harvard took home the title. It would not lose again until January, running off 10 straight wins in all.

But injuries struck again. Before the Crimson’s biggest nonconference game—on the road against Connecticut, a perennial regional power that had beaten Harvard four times in as many years—Saunders was declared out with injury. Despite 21 points and six threes from Chambers, the Crimson once again failed to hold a halftime lead. UConn outscored Harvard by 10 in the second half, and ultimately overcame the Crimson, 61-56.

Afterward, the team was quick to dismiss its leading scorer’s absence as the reason for the loss.

“When Wesley went down, we were just going to do it as a team,” Chambers said. “Somebody was going to step up.”

Saunders would miss three games, the last of which was the Crimson’s worst performance of the year. Facing Florida Atlantic University, whose coach, Mike Jarvis, had been passed up in favor of Amaker for the Harvard job seven years earlier, the Crimson shot just 23 percent from the field en route to a 15-point defeat. It was Harvard’s only double-digit loss of the season and, as the team prepared to enter conference play, it left a sour taste in the players’ mouths.

“It’s one of those games where you’re dumbfounded, a little befuddled,” Amaker said. “We haven’t been like that this year. We normally have had stretches where we haven’t played as well, but we’ve found ways out of it.”

III. A LEAGUE OF ITS OWN

For the last two years, the Crimson had to rely on the losses of other teams—Penn and Princeton—to clinch its berth in the NCAA Tournament. With the graduation of Tiger Ian Hummer ’13, the reigning Ivy League Player of the Year, the odds looked good for Harvard to nab the 2013-2014 Tourney bid without much trouble.

But Yale sophomore Justin Sears would emerge as a force in New Haven. Suddenly, what looked like an easy ride turned into a gritty Ivy season in which the Crimson had to continually look over its shoulder, glancing southwest to find out what happened at Yale’s Payne Whitney Gymnasium.

In other words, at least for this season, the “Big Game” in the Harvard-Yale rivalry shifted from the gridiron to the hardwood, and which team would punch a ticket to the Big Dance largely came down to a single contest in the last weekend of the year.

But, to get to that position, Harvard first had to drive past the rest of the Ancient Eight.

The Crimson began its conference season with two games against Ivy travel partner Dartmouth. With an injury to Big Green star Gabas Maldunas in the squads’ first matchup—a 61-45 Harvard win—the second contest proved to be no contest at all, and Harvard took down the Big Green on the road, 80-50. It was two Crimson veterans that led the team in its opening series of conference play, as Curry totaled 31 points and 10 assists in the two games, while junior forward Steve Moundou-Missi notched 28 points and went a perfect 10-of-10 from the charity stripe.

Out of the 40 minutes of the second contest, two in particular seem to have had perhaps the greatest implications for the season. With 4:29 left in the second half and his team up by 31, Smith checked into his first game of the year, clocking 120 seconds on the floor.

But five days after Smith played his first minutes of the season, it was announced that he would be out for the remainder of the year. The junior had apparently reinjured his foot, and the timeline for his return quickly shifted from “indefinite” to a permanent spot on the end of the bench.

“[It’s] very disappointing,” said Amaker on the Friday following the re-injury. “For him, first of all, and then very disappointing for our team, knowing that he was going to be an integral part of the season—of whatever success we were going to have—and now we don’t have him.”

The next weekend brought two opponents to Lavietes that typically give Harvard more trouble than the squad from Hanover: Princeton and Penn.

In a Friday game that featured high offensive efficiency—with both the Tigers and the Crimson shooting above 50 percent from the field—the home squad eked by its Ivy rivals with an 82-76 victory.

The win was anything but easy, however, as Harvard saw a sizeable lead cut down in the final minutes of play. Poor free throw shooting from the Crimson—which missed six shots from the stripe in the contest’s final 2:11—enabled Princeton to silence the loud Harvard crowd by cutting the Crimson advantage to four.

Despite Tiger co-captain T.J. Bray’s 26 points, Princeton was unable to capture the lead, and the Cambridge residents earned their third league victory, largely behind the offensive performance of their backcourt. Rivard knocked down six treys on the night, and soon-to-be Ivy League Player of the Year Saunders tallied 24 points, nine rebounds, and seven assists.

Penn posed little threat for Harvard on the following day, and for the second time in a week, the Crimson took down an opponent by a score of 80-50.

While Harvard relied on an abundance of offense in its first four conference games, the next weekend’s doubleheader against Brown and Yale proved to be of a grittier variety.

Although the Crimson outlasted Brown, 52-45, on Friday, despite shooting only 32 percent from the field, a second consecutive night of poor shooting doomed Harvard to its first loss of Ivy play, a 74-67 win for Yale.

The Bulldogs were led by sophomore forward Justin Sears, whose 21 points and 11 rebounds would prove only a preview for what was to come in the squads’ second matchup of the year. For the weekend, the Crimson shot just over 35 percent from the floor, almost 14 percentage points below its conference average.

“I anticipated it being one of the tougher games we would have,” Amaker said. “We have always thought of them as having great personnel…. They put on a tremendous effort to get a road win against us, something that doesn’t happen very often.”

After driving down to Columbia early on the following Thursday to avoid a snow storm, Harvard was forced to stay in New York City late, as a standout performance from Lions junior forward Alex Rosenberg spearheaded Columbia into a double-overtime, down-to-the-wire contest against the reigning Ivy champs.

Rosenberg totaled 34 points on the night, and a combined 14 points from him and teammate Maodo Lo in the final six minutes of regulation spurred a late Lions comeback. Rosenberg had his way both inside and out, backing down Crimson defenders in the post and converting 4-of-6 shots from behind the arc to lead his team into two rounds of extra minutes.

However, with the game clock running down in the first overtime, Rosenberg made contact with Rivard near the right elbow, and a whistle from the referee signaled an offensive foul on the junior, taking away a potentially game-winning basket. The visiting team was able to close it out from there, and left the Big Apple with an 88-84 victory.

“We felt that this was a critical game, [and] I think [Columbia] felt the same way,” said Amaker in the postgame press conference. “I think it was evident by how both teams played, how hard both teams fought for this victory.… [C]ertainly for us, I think to be able to turn the page from last weekend after a Saturday night loss at home, I thought this was a critical game.”

After cruising by Cornell on the following night, the Crimson hit the road for its annual Killer P road swing. It breezed past the Quakers on Friday night and made history on Saturday by taking down Princeton at Jadwin Gymnasium for the first time since 1989.

Fresh ink seeped into the record books as the victory over Princeton marked the first time in Harvard history that the squad swept the season series over both the Tigers and Quakers.

“[In practice], we expressed to [the underclassmen] how meaningful it was [to win at Princeton],” said Curry after the win at Jadwin. “This is our last go-around, and the seniors before us did the same thing. You realize how much it means to you when you are there.”

Two wins over Cornell and Columbia during the following homestand would set up the biggest game of the year.

The Crimson and Bulldogs were about to face off, with a record night from Bulldog Sears waiting in the wings.

IV. THE GAME: HARDWOOD EDITION

Harvard headed to New Haven on March 7th with title implications in the air and Crimson fan buses on the road.

Harvard and Yale sat in the No. 1 and 2 positions in the Ivy standings: a Crimson win would clinch a league championship and an NCAA berth, while a Harvard loss would keep the Bulldogs in contention.

The game did not disappoint.

The visiting team jumped out to an early lead in the first half, punctuated by consecutive threes from Curry following “Cheater” chants from the Eli fans.  The Crimson led its rivals by 13 at intermission, holding Yale to only 23 points in the first 20 minutes.

But a dominant performance from Sears, who scored 28 of his team’s 58 points, pushed the Elis back into the contest. The sophomore went five-of-five from the field in the second half, collecting 15 points and nine rebounds in the game’s final period in an attempt to keep his squad’s title hopes alive.

Back-to-back scores from Sears—an and-one and a rim-shaking dunk—sliced the Crimson’s lead to only nine with 5:33 left in the game. Plenty of time remained for a Yale comeback.

Two Crimson treys, however, would be enough to put the Bulldogs back on their heels. First up was a three from Chambers, who ran a quick give-and-go with Casey, culminating in a 20-foot three-pointer from the top of the circle.

Then, with 2:18 remaining, a Rivard swish from the corner not only punched the game wide open for Harvard, but also punched the squad a ticket to the NCAA Tournament.

Minutes later, amidst cheers from the Crimson fan section and celebrations from the Harvard players, the final buzzer rang, indicating the team’s third consecutive outright Ancient Eight championship and berth in the Big Dance.

“I think we’ve shown that we have been the best team in our league,” Amaker said after the contest. “We never thought about pressure or expectations…. It’s been about the journey for us. We talked about and used this since the banquet of last year. When teamwork is the destination, victory happens along the way.”

V. MARCHING FORWARD

For a squad whose destination has been “teamwork” all season long, in just a few short hours, it will have a second destination to head towards.

Harvard will find out which team it will face in the second round of the NCAA Tournament on Selection Sunday at 6 p.m. According to current projections, the Crimson will most likely be seeded in the No. 12 position. Harvard will be placed in one of eight possible Tournament locations, ranging from San Diego, Calif. to Buffalo, N.Y.

This week will mark the one-year anniversary of Harvard’s upset over the University of New Mexico, the first NCAA Tournament win in program history. Expectations for the Crimson have only grown since that night, and, riding an eight-game winning streak into March Madness, the spotlight will be on the Crimson wherever the game takes place.

Amaker, however, has maintained that history doesn’t matter when entering the Big Dance.

“I’ve always felt it’s not what you do going into the tournament, it’s what you do within the tournament,” said Amaker after his squad’s final conference win of the season against Brown last Saturday. “You never know what style you’re going to have to go against…[but] we’ve shown that we can line them up and play a lot of different ways, and not only play but be successful.”

—Staff writer David Freed can be reached at david.freed@thecrimson.com.

—Staff writer Juliet Spies-Gans can be reached at juliet.spies-gans@thecrimson.com.