Men's Basketball Beats MIT, 73-52, in Opener

After a lackluster opening 15 minutes to Harvard’s season, all it took was a dunk to get the team rolling once more.

With 5:20 left in the first half against MIT, senior wing Wesley Saunders swung the ball up to the top of the key to junior co-captain Siyani Chambers. Saunders, who had been waiting in the right corner, immediately cut to the nearside second hash mark while classmate Jonah Travis slashed to the middle of the paint. Chambers sent the rock to Saunders who touched it down to Travis, and the big man slammed it home to give Harvard its first eight-point lead of the half.

And with that, Harvard men’s basketball was back.

While the two teams traded baskets for much of the opening period, Travis’s dunk along with a surfeit of Chambers treys that soon followed broke the game wide open, and MIT (0-1) never truly contended again, ultimately falling to the Crimson (1-0), 73-52, Friday night at Lavietes Pavilion.

“I give them a lot of credit, [MIT] played a great game, played hard,” Chambers said. “We had some first game jitters coming out, but around the late [part of the] first half we started catching our rhythm and really doing the stuff Coach wanted us to do.”

Two possessions after the Travis slam, the Crimson swung the ball around the horn once more. Sophomore guard Corbin Miller ended up with the rock, while Travis ran out to set a screen. Miller forewent the pick, and sent the ball instead to Chambers, who caught it on the right wing, dribbled once, pulled up, and drilled a trey to extend Harvard’s lead to nine.

The next Crimson possession saw more of the same—Miller sent a pass to freshman guard Andre Chatfield, who found Chambers on the left wing this time. Different spot, same result, giving the home team its first double-digit advantage of the season.

For good measure, Chambers added another trey to his stat sheet just two minutes later, when he knocked down a shot from the top of the key right before intermission. MIT never came closer than 13 points after that bucket, and despite what Chambers called the team’s “first game jitters,” Harvard finished opening night with confidence.

True to form, it was the two guys that Amaker consistently calls Harvard’s “best player” and “most important player”—Saunders and Chambers, respectively—that led the team on Friday.

While Chambers tallied 15 first half points to lead all scorers, Saunders played more of a facilitator role in the opening period, collecting eight rebounds and dishing out five assists before intermission.

But when the second half began, something shifted and Saunders began to put the ball on the floor nearly every time down the court.

With 17 minutes to go, after Saunders had penetrated the paint and earned trips to the free throw line on consecutive possessions, an MIT pass between junior guard Ryan Frankel and sophomore forward Tim Butala got broken up, and the ball ended up in Saunders’s hands. The senior went coast to coast, laying the ball in to give Harvard its biggest of the night at 19.

After the game, Saunders explained that his decision to be more active with the ball was a result of what he sensed his team needed.

“[I adjusted] with the flow of the game,” Saunders said. “It just happened that some guys were getting open and I was finding them in the first half. In the second half, I was trying to provide a little more energy. We were getting a little stagnant on our offense, so I just tried to push the tempo a little bit.”

Saunders finished the contest with team-highs in rebounds and assists, with nine and six, respectively, and tied for the team-high in points with 15.

On the other side of the court, MIT also relied on its lengthy wingman to shoulder the offensive burden. Junior guard Justin Pedley scored the first bucket of the game—a jumper from about a foot and a half behind the three-point line—and kept gunning the rest of the night. The marksman finished the contest having shot more than one-third of the Engineers’ field goals, going 7-for-16 in 39 minutes of play.

The play of the night, however, came from an unlikely source in an unlikely way. With Harvard up 17 and 11 minutes to go in the matchup, rookie Chatfield intercepted an errant MIT inbounds pass and sprinted up the court. The 6’4” guard reached the paint and took off, elevating for a two-hand dunk to the approval of both his teammates and the crowd.

Ultimately though, for the Crimson, Friday’s win marked just the first box to check off in the four-month grind that is the collegiate basketball season. And for a team with ever-climbing aspirations, there is no time to dwell on an opening-night victory.

“It was good to get the first game out of the way,” Saunders said. “MIT is a good team…and they forced us into a good game. So it was a good way to start off the season but [now we’re onto] Holy Cross.”

—Staff writer Juliet Spies-Gans can be reached at juliet.spiesgans@thecrimson.com. Follow her on Twitter @JulietSpiesGans.