High Flying Dunks Highlight Harvard-Yale M. Basketball Game

It was a dunk-fest like no other.

The Harvard men’s basketball team’s 82-66 win over Yale Friday night at Lavietes Pavilion featured five rim-rocking slams that fired up both sides and produced an electric atmosphere.

Senior center Graham Beatty got the party started right before halftime, as junior guard Michael Beal found him wide-open in the lane as the defense broke down. Beatty grabbed the pass, turned to the hoop, and finished with a two-handed slam that gave the Crimson a 32-26 lead heading into the intermission.

The dunking continued shortly after the break, as junior center Brian Cusworth got acquainted with the rim. Cusworth fed senior guard Kevin Rogus, who took a couple of dribbles before being collapsed upon by the Yale defense. Rogus hit Cusworth with a jump pass, and the 7’0 center took a step toward the basket and threw down a one-handed jam.

“Anytime you can get a dunk, it’s always worth a little more than two points to the team,” junior forward Matt Stehle said.

But Cusworth wasn’t finished.

With the Crimson leading 48-34, junior forward Zach Martin found Cusworth in the lane, and he finished a two-handed jam to give Harvard its biggest lead of the game to that point.

“Our weakside defense was very poor,” Yale coach James Jones said. “We never rotated over when we needed to rotate over, and we gave them easy shots at the basket.”

While the two Cusworth dunks and Beatty slam got the crowd going, Yale guard Casey Hughes would steal the show.

Trailing 53-39 with just over nine minutes to go, the Bulldogs needed a spark. Hughes was quick to provide it, grabbing a defensive board and hitting the outlet to start a fast break. Yale moved the ball up the floor to guard Eric Flato, who lofted the ball toward the hoop for a streaking Hughes. The 6’6 sophomore leapt into the air, grabbed the ball one-handed, and threw it down to complete the alley-oop.

Three minutes later, Harvard senior point guard David Giovacchini found Cusworth once again in the lane, and the seven-footer threw down his third dunk of the evening for two of his game-high and career-high-tying 21 points.

“[Cusworth] had an excellent game—probably his best of the season,” Stehle said. “He was just dominating, and they had no answer for him.”

It was the Bulldogs’ turn to answer in what had become a de facto slam dunk competition, and Hughes nearly took down the house.

After Yale guard Edwin Draughan stole the ball from Giovacchini—one of his two turnovers on the night compared to seven assists—Draughan raced down the floor and hit Hughes. Hughes passed the ball back to Draughan, who lofted the ball up near the hoop. Hughes went up, grabbed it and nailed the back of the rim with the attempted jam.

The spark that could have gotten the Bulldogs, who were trailing by 15 at the time, back in the game became the crushing blow that signaled the team’s defeat.

“It kind of pissed us off that they were trying to throw alley-oops down 15 in our gym,” Stehle said.

Yale made a desperation run late in the game to cut the lead to nine, but Stehle hit two free throws to give the Crimson a double-digit lead for good.

Looking for the exclamation point up 13 with less than 10 seconds to go, Stehle heaved the ball down the court to captain Jason Norman. Norman charged toward the hoop and broke into the signature stride that almost always precedes a two-handed jam. The Harvard captain went up, but got fouled hard by Yale guard Alex Gamboa.

While Norman couldn’t complete the dunk, he mustered enough strength to get the ball up on the rim, and after a few bounces, it fell in.

The layup provided Harvard’s 39th and 40th points in the paint on the contest and put an emphatic ending on a game that the Crimson dominated from start to finish.

“[We] really wanted to finish the game with a little distance, if we could,” Sullivan said of the late Norman dunk attempt. “I don’t think it had anything to do anything that Yale did. We were just really geared to finish the game in workman-like fashion.”

The win vaulted Harvard past Yale in the Ivy League standings for the first time since the two teams met two weeks earlier in New Haven, when the Crimson couldn’t convert on any of its three possessions in the final minute in a one-point defeat.

—Staff writer Michael R. James can be reached at mrjames@fas.harvard.edu.