Cagers Hoping for a Brown-Out This Evening

The Briggs Cage Curse is gone, or at least has been temporarily chased off.

The Harvard men's basketball team (2-14, 1-3 Ivy) has proven it can win at home.

It is also proving it can win, period.

Now Harvard has a chance to prove that it can win against good teams when it faces off against formidable squads from Brown and Yale this weekend.

The Bears (9-7, 3-1 Ivy) will face Harvard tonight, while the Bulldogs (13-3, 3-1 Ivy) rumble into town tomorrow night for two Ivy battles to be held at Briggs.

Statistically, these teams are fearsome.

Yale has four players who shoot over 40 percent from three-point land: senior Captain Ed Petersen (.438) and guards Rob Connally (.408), Damon Franklin (.413) and David Brown (.455).

Brown has four players who average over ten points a game: guards Chuck Savage (13.1 ppg), Rick Lloyd (14.3 ppg) and forwards Jon Drezner (10.4 ppg) and Kirk Lowry (10.5 ppg).

Yale also has the top rebounder in the Ivy League. Stuart Davies, the Bulldogs' 6'7" 200-pound forward, averages a full rebound more per game (8.1 rpg) than any other player in the Ancient Eight. Second on the list is Harvard Captain Ron Mitchell (7.1 rpg), and third is Yale forward Casey Cammann (6.9 rpg).

Brown doesn't have the bruisers, but it has the scorers. It could be a rough weekend.

But it might not. The Crimson has turned the corner, and the visitors could be in for a surprise.

The key to the entire weekend will be the Crimson's perimeter defense. Both Yale and Brown are led by All-Ivy guards.

Brown has a well-balanced attack, but the players who make it tick are Lloyd and Savage. The senior backcourt partners have already dished out 103 assists.

Lloyd bombs away with the best of them, nailing 45.3 percent of his treys. He has completely recovered from a bout of stomach flu which limited his effectiveness against Cornell and Columbia.

Savage is having trouble finding his shot this year (he is 39 percent from the field.), but may have found the groove last weekend against Columbia. With Lloyd on the sidelines, Savage knocked down 20 points in the Bears' 65-60 win.

Yale's Petersen is a top candidate for Player of the Year. The job of stopping him falls to freshman point guard Jared Leake.

Leake always draws the tough assignments: Princeton's Sean Jackson and Pennsylvania's Paul Chambers. But Petersen will be tougher than both of them.

Deadly Combination

Jackson was primarily a shooter, and Chambers was primarily a ball-handler. Petersen is a deadly combination of the two. Not only does he score an average of 17.7 points per night, he also creates nine points more with his flashy passing.

Tyler Rullman has the opportunity to break Savage's newfound rhythm. Rullman's top defensive effort came against Penn, when he hounded Jerome Allen into a 0-for-8 night.

It all starts with the defense. Without it, there is not much chance to slow down those southern New England juggernauts.

But the defense has been a strength, not a weakness. If the offense flows with it, the Crimson could pull off the upsets.

Who knows? The team might even double its win total.