Saunders Propels Men's Basketball to Pivotal Victories

All year, senior wing Wesley Saunders has borne the brunt of the expectations that have been placed on the Harvard men’s basketball team (15-5, 5-1 Ivy).

Before the season, Crimson coach Tommy Amaker said Saunders had a chance to become the best player to ever go through the program.

Through the season’s first eight games, he was garnering attention as a fringe National Player of the Year candidate; averaging over 20 points on 55 percent shooting, he was Harvard’s offensive fulcrum and the team’s defensive anchor.

And yet, the focus was all on the shot he didn’t make—a game-winning attempt against Holy Cross where the ball, and his team, came up just short.

He struggled coming back after finals, not making a shot in the team’s 49-point loss to Virginia. It was the first time in 74 games he hadn’t made a field goal. He had more than 15 in five of his first seven games; it took him two months and 11 games to do it again. He hit as many threes in his two games before the break than he did in the seven after. In the Crimson’s league home opener—a 70-61 loss to Dartmouth—Saunders had six turnovers and missed half of his foul shots.

When his team needed him most, however, Saunders stepped up. The next game, at Princeton, students sarcastically rained down chants of “Jordan” as he calmly put up 14 points, eight assists, and seven rebounds in just 31 minutes—clinching the game with a flurry of steals and late free throws.

This weekend, he made good on the moniker, averaging 24.5 points in a pair of two-point wins that catapulted Harvard atop the Ivy League standings.

Against Brown, he put in 33 points—the highest ever for an Amaker player—and hit the game-tying shot as the buzzer sounded in regulation, fighting through traffic to catch his own miss and lay the ball in.

“Obviously the difference for us [tonight] was Wesley Saunders,” Amaker said Friday. “He played inspired basketball to get the ball to the basket.”

It was not the first time the senior had been called upon to perform late-game heroics. Against UMass his three-point play with 38 seconds to go gave the Crimson a lead it would never relinquish. A week later, he had 25 points, six rebounds, and seven steals in a double overtime victory against Vermont.
If the Brown win was an escape, the victory over Yale the following night was a triumph. The Elis had jumped out to a 5-0 start to the season on the play of junior forward Justin Sears, who had taken over Saunders’ mantle as the frontrunner for Ivy League Player of the Year. Their coach, James Jones, said before the season of Sears: “It’s hard to make an argument that he is not the best player in the league.”
But Saunders and Harvard quieted Yale with a 52-50 win, ascending to a tie for first. Saunders led all players with 16 points, chipping in five points and three assists for good measure. Sears had nine points and seven rebounds.

Although Saunders was the fulcrum of the Crimson offense, scoring or assisting on 42 percent of his team’s points, Sears—who posted just a 19 percent usage rate—rarely touched the ball down the stretch.

Afterwards, Saunders downplayed the significance of the contest. The senior—who scarcely knows what it’s like to lose an Ivy League road game, having won 12 straight and 23 of 26 in his career—noted that there is still a lot of basketball still to be played.

“We were aware of our standing in the league obviously coming into the night, but we approached it as if it were just another game,” Saunders said Saturday. “I think that everyone came out and showed that they were ready to fight, and I think we left it all out on the floor.”

—Staff writer David Freed can be reached at david.freed@thecrimson.com.