Men's Basketball Falls to 1-3 in Ivy League Play on Rosenberg Buzzer-Beater

“Saturday night in the Ivy League is what it is,” Harvard coach Tommy Amaker said.

Senior forward Alex Rosenberg hit an off-balance, turnaround jumper from the left elbow to beat the buzzer and lift Columbia (14-6, 4-0 Ivy League) to a 55-54 victory over Harvard (9-11, 1-3) on Saturday night at Lavietes Pavilion. In a wild contest that featured five ties, four lead changes, and a lopsided run by each team, Rosenberg’s prayer was the difference in the Lions’ first road win against the Crimson since 2008.

After trading positions on the seesaw, captain Evan Cummins put Harvard up one with 1:18 to play. With his team struggling to find an open shot, senior forward Patrick Steeves was fouled with just 35 seconds to go. The Montreal native missed the front end of the one-and-one, giving Columbia a chance to use the clock to its advantage. Star Lions guard Maodo Lo clanked a three-pointer off the back rim and the Crimson corralled its 41st rebound of the contest with 10 ticks to go.

With a chance to put his team up by three, junior guard Corbin Miller, a career 76 percent free throw shooter coming into the game, missed the front end of the one-and-one. Junior forward Jeff Coby smothered the rebound and found Lo, who had been quiet for much of the game, in stride. With Harvard not having a chance to foul, the senior gave up his dribble, found Rosenberg, and a few seconds later a mosh pit of Lions had taken over the back corner of Lavietes.

“It’s a little bit of a chaotic broken floor,” Amaker said. “The thing about it is we had a foul to give and that’s what we had talked about. Obviously, those situations can happen very fast but we should have done that, I guess we weren’t close enough to do it and you get to the point where you don’t want to foul in the shooting motion, so that’s tough.”

Despite only scoring 21 points in the second half and having junior forward Zena Edosomwan on the bench with an apparent leg injury, the Crimson had its chances to put Columbia on the ropes down the stretch. The missed free throws by Steeves and Miller kept the door open for the Rosenberg heroics. On the season, Harvard is shooting 58 percent from the charity stripe, including a 47 percent mark since conference play began.

“[We] weren’t able to cash in and that’s been something that’s haunted us all year,” Amaker said.

The Crimson entered the halftime break with a 33-17 edge after the team outrebounded the Lions, 24-11, and held Columbia to a 24 percent shooting clip. The guests roared to a 16-4 run to start the second frame and took its first lead of the contest with 7:25 to play. Harvard overcame a 15-point halftime deficit against Cornell on Friday night, but with the roles reversed against the Lions, the Crimson once again came up short.

Neither team held a lead bigger than four after the under-eight media timeout. Cummins picked up his fourth foul midway through the second half, but freshman forward Weisner Perez answered the call for Harvard. The Berwyn, Ill. native finished with ten points in seven minutes. The freshman kept the Crimson in the game, connecting on two key three-pointers and scoring eight straight points as the undersized four and Columbia traded buckets down the stretch. It was the first time Perez had scored since the team’s Jan. 12 win against Ryerson.

“It was huge,” Cummins said. “Coach always tells him to have faith in his jumper. For a freshman being ready to step up and hit a few shots like that, that was definitely big for us.”

Harvard was in the contest at the end primarily due to a first half in which it stymied the Lions on both ends of the floor. Seven different Crimson players scored before intermission and the team looked possessed defensively following its cold performance down the stretch against Cornell.

“I was really proud of our guys because we talked about how this night was going to say a lot about who we are and I think it does,” Amaker said. “There’s no question with the energy and the effort the kids played with and I thought we were sensational defensively.”