.45 CALEBER: Next Year's M. Basketball Squad Has True Potential

A .500 record is supposed to symbolize the very essence of mediocrity.

For the Harvard men’s basketball team, however, ending the year at 7-7 in Ivy League play—and 12-15 overall—means a great deal more than that. A record that might signify an average, pedestrian, colorless season for other teams signals something very different for this year’s edition of the Crimson. Getting back to the solid ground of .500 represents a return to respectability, and the successful resuscitation of a program that just one year ago was in shambles.

“Was it a success? Yeah...we improved a lot from last year,” junior forward Matt Stehle said. “It definitely was a huge turnaround.”

Coming on the heels of a miserable 4-23 season—the Crimson’s worst campaign in over 50 years—anything might be looked on as an improvement. But using that philosophy to analyze this season would miss the real strides the team made, and overlook just how close Harvard was to challenging league champion Penn.

There was the four-point loss at home to Cornell, when Harvard let a lead slip away late in the second half. There was the three-point loss in Hanover to Dartmouth, when a last second three pointer from senior guard Kevin Rogus went halfway down before rimming out. There was the two-point loss at Columbia, when Stehle’s desperation tip hit off the side iron. And then there was the one point loss to Yale in New Haven, when three bids at the game-winner in the final thirty seconds went for naught.

Tally it all up, and it comes down to 10 points separating the Crimson from four more league wins. A mere handful of buckets more, and Harvard might well have headed into the final weekend of the year with control of its own postseason destiny.

Of course, the Crimson made all revisionist history irrelevant when it lost by double-digits at both Princeton and Penn to close the season. But even such a disappointing finish should not obscure the achievements of the 2004-05 team. Harvard can point to a win over Brown on the road, a win against Princeton, and a weekend sweep of both Yale and Brown, three accomplishments that separate this year’s squad from those of the recent past.

More importantly than any single win, the Crimson was able to infuse a measure of pride and stability back into a team that had hardly anything to build upon after the 2003-04 season.

“I’m tremendously proud of how far the team has come from 12 months ago,” junior center Brian Cusworth said. “I think we’ve got a bright future.”

With the challenge of hauling the program back from the depths now behind them, the returning members of the Crimson can concentrate on the team’s next task, one unprecedented in school history. Harvard has never won the Ivy League, and its only appearance in the NCAA tournament came in 1946.

“I’ve already set my goals for next season, and they’re the same as they were for this year—to see our name on the [tournament] bracket,” Stehle said. “In terms of the team, everyone is going to expect a lot from us next year.”

Expectations should be high, because Harvard will field a team next year with perhaps the best chance to make it to the Big Dance of any recent Crimson squad. Stehle and Cusworth, already the league’s most formidable frontcourt pair, will return with a year’s experience of playing together. The two starters were statistical twins this season—Stehle led the Crimson in scoring, at 13.7 ppg, and led the Ivy league in rebounding, at nine per game, while Cusworth was right behind him, with 13.4 points and 8.9 rebounds.

Those figures won’t matter, however, unless the team can consolidate the gains it has made this year and make the plunge into unknown territory. In the Ancient Eight, a league tortured by a pair of despotic tyrants in Penn and Princeton, such upward swings have been as infrequent as they have been unsustainable.

“This league in a lot of different ways can be very humbling...All [Ivy teams] are very fragile,” Harvard coach Frank Sullivan said. “Some teams in our league discovered that this year, and a couple teams, like ourselves, played a little bit better than was thought.”

Harvard will have to keep playing a little better than expectations to have a shot at that elusive title in the future, but with its strong rebound effort this season, it has pushed the bar upwards.

For the Crimson next year, seven league wins should mark the three-quarter pole of the season, and not the finish line.

—Staff writer Caleb W. Peiffer can be reached at cpeiffer@fas.harvard.edu. His column appears on alternate Wednesdays.