Harvard Opens Season Saturday

When the Harvard men’s basketball team opens up its 2006-07 season Saturday afternoon versus Maine at Lavietes Pavilion, it will be without the full complement of its recruiting class.

Freshman Tomas Balcetis, a 6’4 combo guard out of Vilnius, Lithuania, withdrew from the team shortly after the beginning of practice this fall due to a heart condition that puts his health at risk in high-activity situations.

Balcetis, who averaged 20 points per game during his senior season at the Holderness School in Plymouth, N.H., made the decision to remove himself from the team in consultation with his parents, after considering the level of physical exertion necessary to play Division I basketball and the dangers that exertion posed to his heart.

“I’ve had this condition for like four years now,” Balcetis said. “It’s never been really serious at all, but when the level of basketball increases, the workload increases, so it’s kind of hard to sometimes go 100%, and college basketball is all 100% or nothing. I decided that maybe I should step down and maybe make basketball my hobby.”

Balcetis was one of the highlights of coach Frank Sullivan’s frosh class. The swingman, although more of a shooting guard, had the potential to see minutes at the three position, left vacant by the graduation of guard/forward Michael Beal ’06. Given the guard-dominated dynamic of the Ivy League, having a shooter of Balcetis’s caliber to team with the Crimson’s backcourt standouts, sophomore point guard Drew Housman and senior shooting guard Jim Goffredo, would have given Harvard’s chances to surprise in the league this year a boost.

“He was definitely a fierce competitor,” senior center Brian Cusworth said. “He had that, not to use a stereotype, but that European game…he had a very nice stroke from the outside.”

The loss of Balcetis is another piece of bad news for a Crimson squad that has suffered its fair share of misfortune since the second half of last season. After getting picked to finish second in the league in last year’s preseason Ivy media poll, Harvard lost eight games in a row late in the season to finish 5-9 in league play.

This year, the team faces life without graduated captain Matt Stehle ’06, the two-time First Team All-Ivy forward who carried the team on both ends of the court, as well as Beal and sixth man Zach Martin ’06. Added to that is the fact that Cusworth, their All-Ivy 7’0 center, will graduate after Harvard’s first semester and thus only be able to participate in the team’s first 18 games.

Those factors combined to produce a far different result in this year’s media poll—the young and relatively inexperienced Crimson was picked by the 16 media members from the eight Ivy areas to finish seventh, ahead of only Dartmouth, in the poll released on Tuesday.

“That poll really means nothing,” Cusworth said. “People picking us second last year was flattering, but it didn’t give us any entitlement. It started with what we did on the court, and we obviously didn’t live up to the hype.”

Harvard will begin its attempt to overcome the loss of quality personnel and prove the pollsters were mistaken at home versus Maine on Saturday. In addition to returning starters Cusworth, Housman and captain-elect Goffredo, the Crimson is expected to go with sophomore Andrew Pusar at the three guard and sophomore Evan Harris at power forward.

“The gap between [Pusar and Harris] and any people that we bring off the bench in those positions is very small right now,” Sullivan said. “It’s as small as it’s ever been, and that’s a good thing because developing depth is really an important priority for the team.”

The Black Bears were picked to finish second in the increasingly competitive America East conference, which has received a good amount of buzz over the last several years thanks to the performance of its teams in the NCAA tournament. Vermont beat heavily favored Syracuse in 2005, and this past spring No. 16 seed Albany nearly pulled off the greatest upset in tournament history, leading for much of the game before falling to the UConn juggernaut. Harvard plays both Vermont and Albany later in the season.

Maine will prove to be an early challenge to the Crimson’s commitment to improvement on perimeter defense. Last year, Harvard ranked seventh in the Ivy League in three-point field goal percentage defense, a critical shortcoming in a league rife with outside shooters. Maine is led by Kevin Reed, who returns to the team after being medically redshirted last season. Reed has over 1,000 points and 500 career rebounds, and is the Black Bears’ all-time leader in three-point makes, a record he set in a win over Harvard two years ago.

Saturday will also mark the collegiate debut of Maine redshirt freshman Junior Bernal, a highly-regarded guard who averaged 23 points, six rebounds and six assists in high school.

Tip-off is set for 1 p.m at Lavietes Pavilion.

—Staff writer Caleb W. Peiffer can be reached at cpeiffer@fas.harvard.