Inside the Ivy

Game of the Week
Yale (11-8, 3-1 Ivy) at Penn (10-6, 2-0 Ivy) – Saturday, February 4, 7:00 pm
With Yale’s resurrection this past weekend, the Saturday showdown in Philly is easily the biggest game of the Ivy League season to date. The Bulldogs come in fresh off a dominating sweep of Harvard and Dartmouth and knowing that they smoked Penn the last time these two teams got together. However, each of the last three seasons Yale has fallen early in league play, then crawled back into borderline contention only to suffer a season-wrecking letdown. And most of these lapses have come on the road. On Saturday the Bulldogs will be facing a Penn team that figures to be angry and focused after a very avoidable loss to Saint Joseph’s. If Yale wants a shot at its first win at The Palestra since 1997, it’s going to have to limit the turnovers. That’s a tall order for any team against Penn’s defensive pressure, but especially for the Bulldogs, who enter the weekend 312th in the nation in turnover percentage at 25.4 percent. The Quakers’ only real vulnerability on defense is the three-point line, but Yale takes a far lower percentage of its shots from outside the arc than anyone else in the league. The game will be televised on Comcast’s CN8 channel in both the New England and Mid-Atlantic regions, as well as over the Internet at CN8.tv.

Line of the Week

1.28.2006 at Brown   TOT-FG 3-PT   REBOUNDS            
    FG-FGA FG-FGA FT-FTA OF DE TOT TP A TO BLK S MIN
Goffredo, Jim…………… G 9-12 8-10 4-7 0 4 4 30 1 2 0 2 33
Impressing

Yale rolls at home. Spurred on by a raucous band and student section at The Church, Yale easily defeated arch rival Harvard in front of the YES Network cameras on Friday night. The Bulldogs then took care of business the following night with a relatively easy 17-point win over a struggling Dartmouth squad.
Jim Goffredo’s shooting display. Brown fans saw an incredible long-distance shooting performance on Saturday night when the Harvard junior knocked down 8 of 10 three-point attempts, including seven in a row at one point. Goffredo now has two 30-plus scoring efforts in his last four games.
Mark Zoller. The Penn junior’s ankle is feeling better, and he has stepped up in a big way lately, averaging 16.9 points and 7.0 rebounds in his last seven outings. Most impressively, Zoller is shooting 50 of 78 (64.1 percent) from the field and 10 of 17 (58.8 percent) from three-point range in that span.
Adam Gore lights up Columbia. Gore added to an already impressive Ivy League Rookie of the Year rèsumè with an 18-point second half at Columbia on Saturday, as Cornell picked up an emotional win. The freshman phenom finished with a career-high 28 points on 9-of-13 shooting from the field.
Keenan Jeppesen. After scoring just 6.4 points in his first 15 games this season, the Brown sophomore enjoyed the best weekend of his collegiate career. Jeppesen’s 25-point performance was the key to Friday’s double-overtime win over Dartmouth, then he dropped 18 on Harvard the next night.
Distressing

Ibby Jaaber is human. After beginning the season with 14 straight strong outings, Jaaber had two subpar games in a row this past week. He went 0-for-6 from three-point range against La Salle on Wednesday, then struggled offensively again on Saturday in the loss to Saint Joseph’s.
Crimson-faced. Harvard didn’t fare well in a hostile environment on Friday, making poor decisions, forcing things, and settling for bad shots. When the officials broke up an illegal Harvard huddle in a hallway during a second-half timeout, you could see the Crimson players did not want to go back out there.
Joe Scott’s playing time allocation. It’s obvious that Scott is searching for answers at this point and is pretty much willing to try anything — including starting a 6-4 JV star at forward. But it’s tough for players to see their playing time fluctuate wildly and their roles change from game to game.
Columbia’s wheels come off. Leading 37-34 at halftime, the Lions played one of their worst halves under Joe Jones, getting outscored 47-22 in the final 20 minutes by a team they beat a week earlier on the road. Now they’re 1-3 in the league and things are back to doom and gloom in Morningside Heights.
Road-weary Big Green. Dartmouth is 17 games into the season and has played just four home games — two fewer than anyone else in the league. This weekend the Big Green will get back on the bus for another Ivy road weekend in the Empire State to cap off its second five-game roadtrip of the season.

Jake Wilson

Publisher and Editor-in-Chief, Basketball U.

Jake Wilson wrote 754 posts

Post navigation


Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published.

You may use these HTML tags and attributes:

<a href="" title=""> <abbr title=""> <acronym title=""> <b> <blockquote cite=""> <cite> <code> <del datetime=""> <em> <i> <q cite=""> <s> <strike> <strong>