Harvard Loses Star Point Guard to Torn ACL

UPDATED: September 3, 2015, at 11:16 a.m.

With two months to go before its first game, the Harvard men’s basketball team may have already suffered its worst loss of the season. The team announced Wednesday morning that three-year starter and captain Siyani Chambers will take a voluntary leave of absence from Harvard College after sustaining a torn ACL during summer workouts.

Described repeatedly by coach Tommy Amaker as the team’s “most important player” over the last three years, Chambers has finished either first or second in the Ivy League in assists in each season he has played. He was named Ivy League Rookie of the Year as a freshman, making the All-Ivy League First Team after filling a leadership void left by the departed Brandyn Curry ’13-’14 and Kyle Curry ’13-’14 on a team with just one senior in the rotation.

Chambers, who is expected to return to the team for the 2016-2017 school year, leaves with no obvious backup. Nominal backup point guard Alex Nesbitt '15 was injured last year and has since graduated, while junior Corbin Miller and sophomore Andre Chatfield functioned more as spot-up shooters than primary ball-handlers. Junior Matt Fraschilla and freshman Tommy McCarthy, a three-star recruit from Carlsbad, California, will also be in the mix for the starting job.

The team, which already faced an uphill battle to its fifth consecutive Ivy League championship after losing three of its top six players to graduation, sees its championship hopes sink. The loss of Chambers takes the Crimson from being arguably the league’s strongest team to the middle of the pack.

The stats back up the bleak forecast: the only two returning starters from last year, senior Agunwa Okolie and junior Zena Edosomwan, combined for 8.3 points a game. Overall, the team returns just 36 percent of its scoring from the previous year. Save Miller, no returning player averaged more than 12 minutes a game last year.

The Crimson won’t miss Chambers during its first two contests, early-season home games against McGill and MIT that appear to be wins on paper. However, the three-game stretch against local opponents Providence, UMass, and Boston College could be telling of the team’s prospects for the season.

With Chatfield, Okolie, Edosomwan, and sophomore forward Chris Egi, Amaker has a lot of length to play with defensively. The team’s struggle will be where it almost always has been: on the other end of the floor. Without Chambers pushing the ball in transition or spotting up around the arc, two images that have become synonymous with Harvard basketball over the past three years, figuring out the offense will be the key to the Crimson season.

—Staff writer David Freed can be reached at davidfreed@college.harvard.edu.