Male Breakout Player of the Year: Wesley Saunders

When the Harvard men’s basketball team arrived at the NCAA tournament in 2012, then-freshman Wesley Saunders played a small role for the team. Playing 13.9 minutes a game, the swingman averaged a mere 3.3 points for Tommy Amaker’s Ivy League champions, who relied on the strong inside post play of Keith Wright ’12 and then-junior Kyle Casey to outmuscle opponents inside. Guards Oliver McNally ’12 and then-junior Brandyn Curry made up the backcourt, with then-sophomore sharpshooter Laurent Rivard filling out the starting lineup and helping stretch the floor around Wright and Casey.

A year later, the 6’6” sophomore was Harvard’s primary offensive weapon. The highly-touted recruit from Los Angeles became the focal point of opposing coaches’ defensive game plans. His shooting touch and ability to finish in traffic made him an ideal fit in Harvard’s revamped lineup, which relied more on outside shooting than pounding the ball inside. On the defensive end, his long frame allowed him to guard defenders in the post or in the perimeter. Against Princeton, Saunders rotated between 6’7” Ivy League Player of the Year Ian Hummer to point guard T.J. Bray as his team needed.

“We leaned on him so much [this year],” Amaker said. “We need him to guard the best perimeter opponent, to be our best playmaker and for him to be a force in rebounding. He was the best all-around player in our league [and that’s] what we’ll need from him in the future and what we think he is.”

Saunders shined from the beginning of the year, when the team traveled across the Atlantic to play preseason games in Italy. Amaker said that you could see “a progression of work ethic and improvement of confidence” in Saunders towards the end of his freshman year that carried over.

“In the summer, he took it to a different level—his work ethic, his determination, his commitment,” Amaker said. “My guess is that he would say he worked harder than he’s ever worked. In Italy, he was hands down our best player.”

At the NCAA tournament this year, Saunders said that part of his improvement over the course of the summer was not only physical but mental. In the fall, when Casey and Curry withdrew from school, the burden fell on the sophomore to take up the majority of the team’s scoring in their absence.

“A lot of it was getting mentally prepared for the whole season,” Saunders said. “I knew it would be a long season.”

The departure of Casey, in addition to the graduation of Wright, forced Amaker to adopt a different offense built around the unique talents of Saunders and freshman point guard Siyani Chambers. With the rotating cast of sophomores Jonah Travis, Steve Moundou-Missi, and Kenyatta Smith playing down low for the Crimson, Harvard used a four-out approach that relied on Saunders’ driving skills to open up outside looks for Rivard and Webster.

Saunders’ array of pull-up jumpers, mid-range floaters, and up-and-under layups forced defenses to collapse to the paint when he beat defenders off the dribble, forcing them away from the Crimson’s perimeter threats. Saunders was counted on not only to provide scoring—he averaged 16.2 points per game on the season—but to make the right pass when needed, when Chambers would swing the ball around the perimeter to find the open shot.

With few other options at shooting guard, Saunders rarely got rest. In playing 37.3 minutes a game, the sophomore delivered night after night with double-digit point totals in each game but one, the team’s final defeat against Arizona. At the tournament, the sophomore swingman credited Amaker with challenging him to raise his game on both ends during the season.

“That’s just a challenge that Coach had for me coming into the season,” Saunders said. “He told me he’d have me covering the best player and that he wanted me to lead us on offense.”

Time and time again, Saunders was the team’s rock. In both of the team’s two best wins of the non-conference season, at Boston College and California, the sophomore had 18 points. In helping Harvard stave off Dartmouth in overtime on Feb. 26, Saunders had 20 points, seven rebounds, and two blocks, as the team erased a 10-point deficit in the final moments of regulation. In two close victories against Brown—the first of which was a double-overtime barnburner—Saunders averaged 18.5 points and six rebounds.

Saunders’ year of hard work culminated with a team-high 18 points and four rebounds in the team’s second-round tournament victory against New Mexico. On the defensive end, Saunders held NBA prospect Tony Snell to just nine points on 12 shots and denied him the paint to force the Lobo into contested three after contested three. After UNM junior Kendall Williams missed a free throw with 11 seconds left, it was Saunders that emerged from a scrum with the ball, throwing it ahead to Chambers as the Crimson ran out the clock and made history.

For the sophomore combo guard, who had largely watched from the bench as Vanderbilt eliminated the Crimson in the first round in 2012, it was the culmination of a year-long transformation. It had begun with hundreds of shots hoisted in empty gyms. It had continued in arenas from California to Italy. It culminated when Saunders stepped to the line in Salt Lake City and sank two free throws with 17 seconds left to seal the victory, no longer shooting in an empty gym.

—Staff writer David Freed can be reached at davidfreed@college.harvard.edu. Follow him on Twitter @CrimsonDPFreed.