Men's Basketball Bounces Back Against Killer P's

­PHILADELPHIA — Let’s take a look at the second night of Harvard men’s basketball.

Literally, I’m talking about Saturday night’s 63-38 victory over Penn to sweep a back-to-back road trip against the Quakers and Princeton.

But I’m really talking about something that came up in the postgame press conference, so let’s skip the 25-point beatdown the Crimson put on Penn and go behind the bleachers at the Palestra, inside some wooden French doors, and into a small press conference room.

Harvard coach Tommy Amaker sits at the front, hunched like a chess player, hands kept underneath the table. Not many questions concern the big win, so he has a chance to get a little more philosophical.

A couple questions in, Amaker discusses the challenges of the Ivy League’s back-to-back-heavy schedule. This weekend’s Friday-Saturday road trip was the first of four that will largely determine the Ivy results.

Specifically, Amaker talks about those Saturday games—suiting up again in a new city against a new team with the same goal you had in the previous night’s game.

“We’ve talked internally a lot about the second night, how critical and important it is in this conference,” Amaker said. “Whatever you do on Friday, win or lose, how important the Saturday night game can and will be and we’ve embraced that through the years here.”

Sure, Harvard’s been great on those second nights for a long time. But maybe Amaker is not only talking literally about playing Saturday after playing Friday.  Really, every game after the opener is the second night—a chance to bounce back or a time to forget past success.

Harvard has had to do plenty of both so far this year. The collection of zits on its portrait keeps growing. There was the loss against the Crimson’s first Division I opponent of the year. Then came back-to-back losses for the first time since the Penn-Princeton road trip of 2013.

Later, a loss to Boston College snapped a six-game winning streak against the local rival. Most recently came a defeat in Harvard’s Ivy opener, which dropped the Crimson out of the Ivy’s top two for the first time since 2010.

Somehow, the Crimson has had successful proverbial second nights after all of those disappointments. And they’ve done it the same way, by learning from the loss, getting back to practice, and moving on.

That’s what the team did after last Saturday’s loss to Dartmouth, in which it allowed a late 26-2 run to surrender a double-digit lead in a 70-61 loss.

But the second night isn’t just about moving on. It’s also about building on--about evolving from one night to the next.

I told myself I wouldn’t turn this column into a cheap comparison to yesterday’s attention-hoarding Super Bowl, but humor me briefly.

Four months ago, the Patriots were ridiculed and written off after losing 41-14 to Kansas City on Monday Night Football. Afterwards, New England coach Bill Belichick stuck to his next-game mantra (“We’re on to Cincinnati”).

But successful football is not just about going from game to game, it’s about growing from game to game, and nobody knows that better than Belichick. His teams have always improved immensely over the course of the year, 2014-2015 being no exception.

After Saturday’s game, one reporter asked Amaker if he thought his team was the New England of the Ivy League. On the whole, a pretty silly question. The kind you get when there is not much else to ask about following a blowout win in the second press conference in two days.

But maybe there is at least one similarity this year.I left the University of Virginia game, a 76-27 horror show back in December, thinking this Harvard team might not be as good as it has been in years past—maybe not nearly as good.

It relied too much on one man, senior wing Wesley Saunders, to score. Junior co-captain Siyani Chambers had not taken a leap forward and no wing or forward had emerged to replace Kyle Casey’s or Laurent Rivard’s scoring from the previous year.

That game could have been the end of an era. Instead, it was the prelude to Harvard’s long second night, so to speak.

Since then, the Crimson’s one reliable scorer early in the season has seen his statistics take a nosedive. Saunders was held to fewer than 15 points just once before the UVA game. He hasn’t scored more than 15 since.

By month, his points-per-game average has dropped from 22 in November to 15 in December to 11 in January.

But that’s been good for the Crimson. Saunders had 14 assists and 11 rebounds over the two games this weekend and registered his first zero-turnover performance against Penn.Meanwhile, four players finished in double-figures against Penn, a night after five scored 10 points or more against Princeton.

Co-captain Steve Moundou-Missi recovered from his 26-percent-shooting December to shoot 50 percent from the field in January. Senior forward Jonah Travis emerged to provide energy off the bench. Junior Agunwa Okolie had his first two double-digit outings of the year on back-to-back nights.

Sure, the second night refers to a specific quirk of Ivy basketball schedule. But for this team, it could also be a larger mantra. It’s code for tomorrow, for getting another day to attack the same challenge.

And while that four-week stretch during which Harvard went 4-4 looked pedestrian, there was a second night—this weekend—during which the Crimson seemed to get back on track.

—Staff writer Jacob D.H. Feldman can be reached at jacob.feldman@thecrimson.com.