Captain On Fire, Sinks Long Island

Jim Goffredo knows exactly what to do when the shots aren’t falling—keep shooting.

Harvard’s captain suffered a rough start to the season, and after a brutal two game stretch in Harvard’s wins over Lehigh and New Hampshire, when he made just 4-of-22 shots, Goffredo’s field-goal percentage stood at a sub-par 34 percent.

But the Crimson’s shooting guard has the gunslinger’s mentality you need to overcome poor shooting performances. He entered overtime against New Hampshire having hit just one of his last 12 three-point attempts, but knocked down a huge trey with a minute to play that helped Harvard escape with the victory. Building upon that make, in the last two games Goffredo has reasserted himself by posting back-to-back season-highs in points, scoring 23 in Harvard’s win at Colgate and pouring in 27 on Saturday in the Crimson’s 87-79 win over LIU in Brooklyn.

“As a shooter you can’t worry about [missing] too much—you just have to keep shooting, and have a short memory when it comes to these things” Goffredo said after the win over the Blackbirds. “Whether you’re making a lot or missing a lot you just have to keep shooting, but I definitely felt tonight like I was in a groove, and last game [against Colgate] as well.”

Goffredo has hit 9-of-18 three-pointers the last two games, bumping his seasonal percentage from long range to 41 percent. Goffredo’s 27 points against the LIU matched the total that then-captain Matt Stehle ’06 put up in Harvard’s win over the Blackbirds last season, and earned him Ivy League Player of the Week honors, as announced by the league office yesterday.

Goffredo took advantage of a porous LIU defense to find his groove. Lacking the interior height to play Harvard senior center Brian Cusworth straight up—the tallest player in the Blackbirds’ rotation is 6’7—LIU committed its defensive resources to plugging the middle, routinely getting guards to shade towards the interior and give help when the ball got deep. That left the outside open, and not even a shift from 2-3 zone to man-to-man defense when Goffredo was in the game, a sign of respect for the Crimson’s senior marksman, prevented him from getting more good looks than usual.

“They were definitely sagging off me when I was on the weakside,” Goffredo said. “My guy was down at the block a lot, and I was able to get some quick reversals, and able to get looks with guys closing out to me. They were definitely trying to stop us inside—that helped me get some looks.”

“When the defense is putting that much attention on one or two guys, it leaves other guys open,” added junior forward Brad Unger, who also took advantage of the open perimeter to pour in a career-high 15 points on 3-of-3 from three-point range. “It’s hard to play defense like that at the college level, because most teams have solid players.”

Goffredo is undoubtedly Harvard’s most solid shooter, and thus far, has proven to be the team’s one consistent threat from beyond the arc, ranking second in the Ivy League with 26 threes. Big-game ability—in addition to last weekend’s outburst, Goffredo notched two 30-point games last season—makes him a threat to win a game for the Crimson on any given night. Given the Ivy League’s dependence upon the long-range shot, coupled with Cusworth’s graduation after the first semester, Harvard will need Goffredo to maintain the level of play he established this week to have a shot at competing for the league crown.

And to do that, of course, he has to keep on shooting, miss or make, until he channels that game-changing groove.

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