Harvard Looks to Break Losing Streak

This weekend, the Harvard men’s basketball team will have the opportunity for a season sweep—and for revenge. Breaking the squad’s three-game losing steak with two wins will give it both.

The Crimson will look to take the season series from Brown (7-14, 3-5 Ivy) tonight and avenge its first Ivy loss by defeating Ivy rival Yale (13-10, 5-3) on Saturday.

While Brown does not appear much of a challenge—the Crimson handled the Bears by 14 in last month in Providence—Harvard is not taking any squad lightly, especially in light of its second three-game losing streak of the season.

“Both [Brown and Yale] are solid team coming into this weekend,” Harvard senior center Brian Cusworth said. “We have to shut them down inside and out.”

Cusworth will be most concerned with keeping Brown center Mark MacDonald at bay, as the sophomore put up sixteen points on the Crimson center in the teams’ last meeting.

The focus of Harvard’s collective defensive effort, however, will be on emerging Ivy star Keenan Jeppesen, who averaged 23 points last weekend in a home split against Cornell and Columbia. This is nothing new to the Crimson, as Jeppesen rang up a team-high 18 points in the loss to Harvard.

“He poses a matchup problem because he’s great in the post and has a pretty good outside shot,” Harvard captain Matt Stehle said. “He’s become their go-to player...it’s going to be a team effort to control him.”

If everything goes as planned, the Crimson should return to the win column tonight against the Bears, as Harvard tops Brown in the Ivy League standings and in depth of talent. Breaking the streak cannot come soon enough for the struggling Crimson.

“The immediate goal for us is to stop the three-game losing streak,” Harvard coach Frank Sullivan said. “Our team has been very resilient all year, [So] we need to get back to winning on Friday night.”

Yale, which sits third in the Ivy standings, poses a tougher threat, although the Crimson will not be lacking motivation. as they hope to achieve revenge.

Three weeks ago, the Bulldogs dismantled Harvard at home, pulling away in the second half to win 82-74 and hand the Crimson (12-9, 4-4 Ivy) its first Ivy loss.

It was the first of four league losses, which have put Harvard’s goal of an Ivy championship on hold.

“Our focus shifts slightly as we’re four games out [of first],” Stehle said. “We’re concentrating on the short term [with] Friday against Brown and getting a win against Yale to pay them back for our first league loss.”

The Crimson will face a test from a Yale team with a scorching offense, as the squad has maintained the highest field goal percentage in the league, a devastating .499 clip. To win, Harvard will have to cool the Bulldogs off, something the team failed to do three weeks ago.

“They’ve gotten consistent 50 percent shooting from the four and the five spot most of the year,” Sullivan said. “It was a problem in our game, the field goal percentage got so high, and we weren’t protecting the rim at all.”

The challenge will be a different one for the Crimson in Saturday’s game. For one, Yale is on the road, a fact that has spelled disaster for the Bulldogs this season—Yale is 0-3 in league play on the road while being undefeated (5-0) at home. Additionally, Yale’s leading big man, Sam Kaplan, is questionable to play due to an injury that kept him out last weekend.

Since Yale and Brown have such different styles of play, the Crimson will have to readjust quickly. Tonight, Harvard will be facing a Brown club that employs a motion offense designed specifically to open up the court and shoot the three. On Saturday, the Crimson will have to change its defensive strategy to combat a Yale team that pounds the ball inside to Kaplan and fellow big man Dominick Martin.

“This weekend is going to be a big test for us,” Cusworth said. “The Yale team plays very physical inside [so] we can’t let any of their post players out tough me or any of our post players.”

Another key will be Harvard’s ability to get junior guard Jim Goffredo back in the swing of the offense. After struggling against Princeton and Penn—he didn’t make a single three against the Tigers—the Crimson hopes Goffredo can return to the level he played at last time Harvard met the Bears and the Bulldogs. Against Brown, Goffredo was 8-of-10 from behind the arc, netting 30 points; in the loss to Yale, he was the team’s leading scorer with 21 points.

“[Goffredo]’s a big part of our success,” Stehle said. “We put a lot of pressure on him to make outside shots because nobody else has been making threes this year.”

The Bulldogs and Bears rank fifth and sixth, respectively, in three-point field goal defense. Compared to Princeton and Penn, who were near the top in this statistic, Brown and Yale should pose less viable threats for Goffredo, a good sign for Harvard’s perimeter attack.

—Staff writer Walter E. Howell can be reached at wehowell@fas.harvard.edu.