Men's Basketball Pulls Away in Second Half to Top Rice, 69-54

With just over a minute left in the game, senior guard Brandyn Curry shook his mark with a stutter step, darting to the left. As three defenders turned to stop his drive, Curry stopped on a dime, lofting an alley-oop to classmate Kyle Casey, who threw down an emphatic dunk. Casey’s score put Harvard (13-1) up by 13, and Curry’s free throws 37 seconds later capped the scoring on a 69-54 win over Rice (5-8).

On the night, the two veterans combined for 30 points and led the charge on a second-half surge that broke open a close game. After Rice guard Keith Washington’s layup six and a half minutes into the second half cut the Crimson’s lead to four, Curry and Casey took the game into their own hands.

In the next five minutes, the two scored or assisted on each basket in an 11-2 Harvard run that put the visitors up by 13. The Owls would not get closer than eight points the rest of the night. Overall, Curry and Casey combined for 22 points in the second half.

“Brandyn did a great job,” junior Wesley Saunders said. “He’s always steady. Coming off an injury, he’s just now getting his footing back, so I feel that he did a great job, just balancing out the team and keeping us composed under pressure.”

With the win, Harvard moved to 13-1 on the season, the program’s best start since the 1945-46 season. The Crimson has not lost since a Nov. 24 road loss to the Colorado Buffaloes, winning nine in a row—each by a margin of six points or more.

“We definitely saw ourselves in this position, and it's great to be in it,” Curry said. “The scariest thing is that we still feel like we haven’t played our best games yet, and we still have a lot of work to do. It’s great the work we’ve done so far, but there’s still a long season ahead.”

While the two seniors finished the game, Harvard was only able to stick around because of the first half efforts of Saunders and fellow junior Jonah Travis. The two combined for 22 first-half points and made nine of the Crimson’s 12 first-half field goals. Overall, the duo made nearly 80 percent of their shots in the first half, while the rest of the team made just 10 percent.

“[Saunders] is one of the better all-around players in the country,” Amaker said. “He’s really a dynamic in every phase of the game.… He can rebound, he can score it, he can shoot. He’s a rebounder and our best perimeter defender.”

The Crimson won despite a scoreless night from sophomore point guard Siyani Chambers, who missed all nine of his shots from the field, including three from behind the arc. Although it was his first scoreless game in a Harvard uniform, the sophomore led the team with six assists and added three offensive rebounds.

Harvard jumped out to a 13-5 lead early, with Saunders and Casey contributing four points apiece. But after extending the lead to double digits at 19-9, the Crimson was not able to get the lead back to 10 for the rest of the half.

The Owls shot 46 percent in the first half and capitalized on poor transition defense by Harvard—an aspect of the game Curry noted the team has to improve on in the second half of the season.

“We feel like we’ve given up a lot of points and easy buckets in transition,” Curry said. “Tonight we felt like every time we had the chance to extend the lead a little bit, Rice would hit a dagger shot in transition.”

The defensive pressure of the Crimson wore on the Owls as the game went on. Rice shot just 35 percent in the second half and made just two of nine three-point attempts after shooting 40 percent from beyond the arc in the first half. Washington was the only Rice player to score in double digits and its only starter to shoot better than fifty percent on the night.

“Our pressure throughout the full 40 minutes, it can wear on you,” Amaker said. “It’s not so much that we did something differently [in the second half], but when you’re constantly facing that kind of energy and activity by our defense … it causes you to miss some shots that maybe you would have made earlier in that game. It’s a 40 minute game.”

—Staff writer David Freed can be reached at david.freed@thecrimson.com. Follow him on Twitter @CrimsonDPFreed.