No. 23 Men's Basketball Improves to 18-2, Bests Brown

PROVIDENCE, R.I.—In last season’s two games against Brown, the Harvard men’s basketball team needed a pair of dramatic second-half rallies to avoid being upset by the Bears.

But in the teams’ first matchup of 2012, no such comeback was necessary, as No. 23 Harvard never trailed on the way to an easy 68-59 victory at the Pizzitola Sports Center.

Junior forward Kyle Casey led the Crimson (18-2, 4-0 Ivy) with 20 points on 9-of-15 shooting and also contributed eight rebounds. Co-captain forward Keith Wright paced Harvard with 11 boards on a night when Harvard outrebounded Brown, 39-25.

“We played really, really hard,” Brown coach Jesse Agel said. “Obviously we would have wanted a different outcome, but you can only play as hard as you can and let the chips fall where they may.”

The Bears (7-14, 1-3) never got closer than eight in the final 18 minutes, as the Crimson consistently hit big shots to halt any Brown attempts at a run.

After a Dockery Walker offensive rebound and put-back floater cut the Bears’ deficit to 47-39 at the midway point of the second half, Casey responded with a long jumper from the left corner and a transition dunk to push the Crimson’s lead to 12.

“I think it was a pretty solid game by me, but [junior point guard] Brandyn [Curry] and our guards just found me off penetration, and I just happened to hit my shots tonight,” Casey said.

After two Sean McGonagill free throws cut Brown’s deficit to 10, Harvard responded with a 5-0 run. Freshman forward Steve Mondou-Missi followed a Casey miss with a put-back layup, and Curry—who finished with 15—completed an acrobatic and-one layup to make it 56-41.

The teams went back and forth for the final seven minutes with Harvard unable to get a lead larger than 15 and Brown unable to get closer than 11 until a McGonagill three with 18 seconds remaining.

Mondou-Missi—who finished with 10 rebounds in 19 minutes—continued to provide energy down the stretch, just as he did Friday night against the Bulldogs. The rookie had an emphatic dunk off an Oliver McNally missed three to make it 60-45, then threw down a long alley-oop pass from McNally for Harvard’s next score.

“Steve was sensational tonight,” Crimson coach Tommy Amaker said. “His play was terrific, absolutely terrific.”

But by that point, the game was far out of reach, and the Crimson completed a dominant road sweep of Yale and Brown after struggling on the same trip last season.

“I think we’re a team on a mission this year,” Casey said. “We have our goals and our standards that we want to hold ourselves accountable to and achieve. We got down early, [but] being a veteran team, I think we learned from those experiences and tried to nip them in the bud and not make the same mistake twice.”

Early on, Harvard looked poised for a blowout, jumping out to a quick 15-5 lead.

Curry started the scoring with a three from the top of the key. McNally followed with a transition layup off a Brown turnover, and Casey put the Crimson up 7-0 by beating his man baseline. The lead soon expanded to 11-3 on a Casey jumper over Andrew McCarthy.

But the Bears fought back from there, putting together a 12-2 run capped by a Stephen Albrecht three to cut the Harvard lead to 17-15.

“They played exceptionally hard,” Amaker said. “We got off to a great start and made some shots, and then it was a dogfight like it always is against Brown.”

Casey went to work again later, with a layup and another jumper over McCarthy to make it 26-20. But Brown hung tough for the rest of the half, not allowing Harvard’s lead to get larger than seven. The Bears got as close as two on a McCarthy layup with 42 seconds left in the first, and a pair of subsequent Curry free throws made it 31-27 going into the break.

All five Brown starters finished in double figures, but its reserves were outscored 14-0 by the Crimson’s.

“Our bench and our balance have been the keys for our team,” Amaker said.

That statistic, combined with Brown’s 11-20 mark from the free throw line, allowed the Crimson to cruise to a victory over a team that led Harvard at halftime by 21 and 11 points in its two meetings last season.

“Our goal this weekend was to come here and get two wins,” Casey said. “So we came down here and did what we set out to do.”

—Staff writer Scott A. Sherman can be reached at ssherman13@college.harvard.edu.