BASKETBALL '07: Is This the Year?

In Lavietes Pavilion, banners hang from the rafters, memorializing the 10 Ivy League championships won by Harvard’s basketball teams.

None, however, belong to the men.

So while the women’s team has been cutting down the nets over the years, its cohort has been left out of the Dance.

To change this, Harvard brought in former Duke All-American point guard Tommy Amaker, formerly the head coach at Seton Hall and Michigan. Amaker has coached teams to where the Crimson hopes to go, having led Seton Hall to the Sweet 16 as a No. 10 seed in the 2000 NCAA Tournament and plans to get Harvard to that promised land soon.

Will it be this year? History says no. In addition to never winning the league, the Crimson has only finished second once, back in 1971, while every other Ivy school has snagged at least part of one crown since league play began in 1956. More recently, Harvard saw promising title chances in 2003 and 2006 slip away as the team faltered in the heat of Ivy play.

The critics dislike Harvard’s chances this year as well. The preseason media poll gave first- place votes to five teams, none of them located in Cambridge. That was generous compared to several publications. Athlon and Street & Smith each picked the Crimson to finish seventh, while Lindys thinks it will finish dead last.

None of this matters to the people who will actually decide where Harvard places.

“Our goal is to win the league,” junior guard Drew Housman says. “We all think it can be done. We don’t pay attention to whatever anyone else is saying. We think if we go out and play our game, we have a good enough team to win it. That’s all we are talking about.”

Housman and his teammates have good reason for optimism. While in the past three years, Penn clearly was the best team in the league, the Quakers lose the two best players in the league over that time, guard Ibrahim Jaaber and forward Mark Zoller. With those two stars gone, Penn’s grip on the league title looks tenuous at best.

With Jaaber and Zoller moving on to pro ball around the world, no one on their talent level remains in the league, much less two players on the same team. The lack of a dominant set of teammates leaves the league without a dominant team.

“The way I see it is that anyone can win on any given night,” sophomore guard Jeremy Lin says. “So, this is probably as open as it has ever been.”

Lin likely will be proven right this season. While either Penn or Princeton has been a part of every title since 1988, both enter this season with major question marks—the Quakers for losing Zoller and Jaaber, and the Tigers for finishing in the gutter of the Ivies last season with a 2-12 record. The two teams combined for one of the 16 first-place votes in the preseason media poll.

Poised to step into the void are Cornell, Yale, and Columbia. All three return talented players from successful seasons last year. The Big Red picked up 10 first-place votes in the media poll, followed by the Bulldogs, who had three.

But that is on paper, not the hardwood.

“We swept Cornell last year,” junior forward Evan Harris says. “I think a lot of people forgot about that. I feel like Columbia and Yale are always tough games, but I don’t see any reason why we can’t win.”

The parity around the league is not the only cause for optimism. Harvard has a strong nucleus returning. Four of the five starters from the end of the season are back. Losing last year’s captain and leading scorer Jim Goffredo ’07 will hurt, but Lin is ready to step into his spot. Harris and Housman are both All-Ivy caliber players, and the influx of three talented freshmen and maturation of a strong group of sophomores should provide the Crimson with a strong bench.

Another factor in Harvard’s favor is Amaker. Not only has he brought a new sense of optimism to the program, but he has also been hard at work teaching the players to better their rebounding and defense, two major problems with the team in recent years. Last season, the Crimson ranked last in the league in scoring defense at 77.4 points per game and was out-rebounded by an average of 0.6 boards per game.

A third element in Harvard’s favor is its place in the preseason media poll. Two years ago, a senior-laden Crimson squad was picked second in the league. With pressure on its shoulders and a bull’s-eye on its back, the team struggled down the stretch and finished with a 5-9 league record. With a sixth-place selection this time, neither the pressure nor the bull’s-eye are there.

“We’re looking to come out and surprise a lot of people,” Lin says. “Most polls have us in the bottom half—sixth, seventh, eighth. We like that, we like being underdogs; we’re just looking forward to surprising a lot of people.”

The pressure this year is on Cornell, Yale, and Columbia, three teams not used to high expectations. Last year, Yale was in contention for the league title before it shockingly got blown out at home by Columbia. How will those teams deal with the pressure this year?

With the league so wide-open and unpredictable this season, it truly is anyone’s game. Harvard hopes to take advantage of the situation and make this “the year.”

“We had a lot of talent my freshman year,” Harris says. “As good as that team was, this year’s team just wants it that much more. I don’t think it’s an issue of why we are going to win; it’s more there isn’t a reason why we can’t.”

—Staff writer Ted Kirby can be reached at tjkirby@fas.harvard.edu.