A few weeks ago you could have gotten pretty good odds on Princeton being 5-1 coming into tomorrow night’s clash with Penn. But after receiving the kinds of breaks they didn’t get last season when they started 1-5, the Tigers have undergone a pretty miraculous resuscitation in league play.

Tiger turnaround
Last year some of the late free throws would have rimmed out against Columbia and Dartmouth, the officials would have blown the whistle on the contact that led to the Tigers’ two steals in the final minute at Harvard, and Princeton would be 2-4. Yet with a much less experienced group of players that had played so horribly outside the league, Princeton suddenly finds itself in the thick of the Ivy League race. Now that could — and probably will — all end tomorrow night on 33rd Street, but grabbing a pair of road wins this past weekend said a lot about how far Princeton has come since the exam break.

The offense isn’t getting the easy layups off precise cuts like we’re accustomed to seeing, but Princeton is suddenly shooting the ball very well from the outside. The Tigers are passing the ball with purpose and are also valuing possessions by taking much better care of it. Defensively, the matchup zone looks much more like it did in non-league play last season, creating turnovers and stifling opposing offenses with its intensity. Seeing this team in action the last two weekends, it’s really hard to believe this is the same group that looked so lifeless and hopeless a month ago. The Tigers were all smiles coming out of the locker room after Friday’s big win, and it was great to see after the difficult first half of the season where nobody seemed to be having any fun.

Room for improvement for Penn
Considering Penn had played only five games away from The Palestra all season, there was some question as to how the Quakers would respond on their first Ivy road trip of the season. It said a lot that nobody on either side was particularly impressed with Penn’s performance on Friday night at Dartmouth, yet the Quakers still managed to win by 19. With the Crimson losing at the buzzer the previous night, Saturday’s Penn-Harvard game wasn’t much of a showdown. Havard seemed to be suffering the lingering effects of the Princeton loss in the first half, falling behind 11-0 and never really getting back in the game. Despite the double-digit win over the only Ivy team that has played remotely close to the Quakers’ level on the season, the Penn coaches and players seemed more disappointed with the defensive complacency that set in with 7:30 left and Penn up 24. That let-down and Eric Osmundson’s shoulder injury have to give Penn some degree of concern going into the Princeton game.

Games very infrequently boil down to individual matchups like the fans tend to think they do. But Saturday featured two very prominent positional battles. Ibby Jaaber tortured Crimson freshman point guard Drew Housman, who finished the game with nine turnovers and admitted afterward he had never gone up against a player like Jaaber. Additionally, Mark Zoller showed that he could play with Matt Stehle, who most people would agree will be the Player of the Year this season if Jaaber weren’t in the league. With the Quakers’ defensive prowess, when Jaaber and Zoller are both on their games, Penn is going to win pretty easily.

Meanwhile in Southern New England…
Its home crowds weren’t up to their usual levels of noise and harassment, but Yale got well at home against Columbia and Cornell. It’s almost certainly too late for the Bulldogs, who had three Ivy losses by the second Ivy weekend and have two road weekends left — where they have yet to win in the league. But after seeing its Ivy dreams dashed last weekend, Yale got to mete out a similar punishment to Cornell, dealing the Big Red its dreaded third loss. Meanwhile, Brown snapped a four-game losing skid with a victory over hapless Columbia, pretty much entirely due to the 43 free throws the Bears attempted.