SEASON PREVIEW: Men's Basketball Embarks on Year of High Promise

The mantra preached by Harvard basketball coach Tommy Amaker to his team last year was meant to shore up the confidence of a group that had been shaken by the unexpected departure of its two best players: “We may not have what we had, but we have enough.”

A year later, that sentiment sounds comically out of place.

In 2012-13, the roster that remained, led by then-freshman point guard Siyani Chambers, then-sophomore guard Wesley Saunders, and the late-season emergence of then-sophomore big man Kenyatta Smith, carried the Crimson to its third consecutive Ivy title, second straight NCAA tournament bid, and first-ever tournament win over No. 3-seed New Mexico. With only one player—current assistant coach Christian Webster ’13—from that historic team lost to graduation, the return of seniors Kyle Casey and Brandyn Curry and the arrival of top-100 prospect freshman Zena Edosomwan have shifted the conversation surrounding Harvard from the Ivy rankings to the national rankings.

The preseason AP poll has the Crimson pegged as the 31st-ranked team in the country, and commentators around the country have anointed this roster as, on paper, the most talented to come out of the Ivy League since the 2009-10 Cornell Big Red, which finished 13-1 in conference play and advanced to the Sweet Sixteen before falling to No. 1-seed Kentucky.

But wins and losses are not awarded on paper. The biggest questions for the Crimson center on how the pieces will fit together and which key contributors from last season must inevitably take a reduced role this year. Both Curry and Chambers have each played a season as the undisputed starter at point guard and now must figure out how to share that job. Smith and Casey will be forced to split minutes in the post with Edosomwan and juniors Steve Moundou-Missi and Jonah Travis. And Saunders, who was first-team All-Ivy and the team’s leading scorer a year ago, may see less of the ball now with all the weapons around him. Attempting to head off any discord, Amaker is now preaching a new refrain for his team: sacrifice.

“We know how important it's going to be for everyone to sacrifice something of themselves for the greater good,” Amaker said. “The kids have been incredibly receptive of that word.”

For the Crimson, sacrifice starts from the top down with co-captains Curry and Laurent Rivard. Along with Casey, Curry took a year off from school in connection with the Government 1310 scandal, got a job, and was forced to watch from afar as his teammates took the program to heights it had never before reached. Rivard, the team’s third-leading scorer from last year, will likely lose his spot in the starting backcourt with the return of Curry, but recognizes the quality up and down the lineup as unmistakably positive.

“Coach [Amaker] made it clear early that we have a lot of good players and a lot of talent, and we need to stay in our roles and share the floor,” Rivard said. “We have new players and a lot of players who played a lot when [Casey and Curry] weren’t there, so we are deeper.”

In a nod to this talent, Harvard was the unanimous selection to finish atop the league in the 2013-14 Ivy League preseason poll, the first team to receive that honor since the aforementioned Cornell team in 2009. Part of this is due to the perceived lack of a legitimate rival. Princeton, last year’s conference runner-up, must deal with the graduation of 2012-13 Ivy Player of the Year Ian Hummer. Penn and Yale, picked to finish second and third in the conference, respectively, might stand the best chance of dethroning the Crimson, returning most of their teams that both finished in the top half of the league a season ago.

“It’s assumed that whoever is the favorite is supposed to waltz through the league, but it's never happened since I've been a part of it,” Amaker said.

Before the opening of Ivy play, Harvard must negotiate through a few tricky non-conference contests. Over Thanksgiving weekend, the Crimson will travel to Anchorage, Alaska to take part in the Great Alaska Shootout. On its way out west, Harvard will make a stop in Boulder to take on Colorado, a team that received comparable amounts of votes in preseason Top 25 polls. The Crimson’s biggest test outside of the league will be its annual date with No. 18/19 Connecticut, the only ranked team currently on Harvard’s schedule.

Then comes the 14-game tournament that is the Ivy schedule, a series of grueling weekends with back-to-back games on Fridays and Saturdays, all of which Harvard will likely be favored to win. Slipups like last year’s loss at Columbia and near-defeats at home against Dartmouth and Brown will bring extra scrutiny, despite coming with the territory of playing in what Amaker terms a “bear” of a conference.

The weight of all these expectations, where anything but a record-setting season might be viewed as a step backward, could either suffocate a team or serve as motivation, but Amaker has chosen a third path for Harvard: to ignore them entirely.

“We have our set identity, our set standards, and our set goals—they don't change,” Amaker said. “Our players know them by heart, and we don't compromise or negotiate with those three categories. Those are internal for us, and we’re never really worried or focusing or trying to listen to anything from the outside world.”

—Staff writer Andrew R. Mooney can be reached at andrew.mooney@thecrimson.com. Follow him on Twitter @mooneyar.