Jeremy Lin’s final non-conference game was supposed to be a coronation. It was a return home to a sell out crowd with a team which was much more competent than the one with which he had traveled to the Bay Area a little over two years prior.
But in the Crimson’s 74-66 win over Santa Clara last night, it was that team and specifically the team’s future, which stole the show.
Freshman forward Kyle Casey nailed all six of his shots from the field including a two-point jumper and two threes and added 13 points in 16 attempts from the line to finish the day with 27 points. He added eight rebounds to bring his two-game average on the West Coast trip to 23 points and seven boards per contest while playing just 25 minutes per.
Casey wasn’t the only rookie to shine, as guards Christian Webster and Dee Giger added 15 and 10, respectively, on a combined 8-of-13 shooting, including 2-of-2 from three.
The scoring outburst from the freshmen left West Coast natives Lin and sophomore Oliver McNally to feed the scorers, as the two combined for 14 assists and just 14 points.
Harvard used a 12-1 run to expand its lead to 19 with five minutes to go, but a 14-2 run by Santa Clara over the next three minutes allowed the Broncos to close to within 67-60. From there, Lin drew a crucial charge and the Crimson iced the game with free throws.
Harvard continues to struggle with turnovers as eight players had two or more, led by Lin with four. The team recorded 20 for the game and is turning the ball over at a rate of once every four possessions this season. Harvard has shot consistently well all season, allowing it to overcome the rampant giveaways, but one must wonder what will happen if it goes cold for stretches in league play.
The victory capped off a four-game winning streak to close out the 11-3 Crimson’s best non-conference season since the Ivy League’s inception.
RANKINGS FREE FALL
After an incredibly strong finish to 2009, the league has stumbled out of the gate in 2010.
Brown tumbled more than 50 spots in the RPI and took similar falls in Pomeroy and Sagarin ratings after splitting home meetings with woeful American and Wagner squads. The Bears scored four points in the final 20 seconds of overtime, as a layup by senior Matt Mullery with five seconds to go gave Brown a 72-71 win over pesky Wagner, which has the fourth worst RPI in the country, but also managed to give Princeton a scare in its last outing.
Columbia fell almost 60 spots in the RPI and incurred huge hits in the Pomeroy and Sagarin ratings, as it dropped a home contest against a suddenly feisty Maine team and barely scraped past the same American team that had dropped Brown previously.
The Lions gave up just six points over the final 13-plus minutes of the first half to take a 24-17 lead into the locker room against American, but yielded 18 points in the first nine minutes after the break to fall behind 35-34. Center Zack Crimmins bailed Columbia out with five points on consecutive possessions to give the Lions a 46-41 lead with four minutes to play, an advantage that Columbia would never relinquish.
Joining the teams in rankings free fall, Princeton followed up its spirited win at Saint Joseph’s with a flat first half in Orono. The Tigers scored just 17 first half points to fall behind by nine at the break. Princeton managed to get within one possession many different times in the second half, but never could close the gap entirely, including a crazy finish where trailing by four, forward Kareem Maddox hit a shot and was fouled, but purposely missed the free throw. The rebound ended up in the hands of forward Nick Lake, who had already hit two threes in the final minute, but his short jumper drew iron and Maine escaped with a 52-50 win.
The loss dropped Princeton’s RPI to 139, more than 40 spots off of its high of 97, with just one Division I non-conference game left to play.
The combined effect of those three teams’ falls in the rankings has knocked the Ivy League’s conference ranking down between two to four spots depending on the source.
STUNNER IN HANOVER
It was the perfect recipe for success. A plodding, ridiculously slow pace of 55 possessions, plus a below-average, but not awful offensive performance and a solid defensive showing equaled a 49-43 Big Green win over Bucknell last night.
The Bison turned the ball over 15 times or on 27 percent of their possessions, shot a horrible 35 percent EFG and only got to the line 10 times, as Dartmouth continued to play above average defense at home.
The Big Green led by as many as 14 with just over 12 to play and still held an 11-point lead with 6:29 remaining, but a 9-2 run cut the lead to four with four minutes left. Only two more points (a Jabari Trotter jumper with 11 seconds left) would be scored the rest of the way as Bucknell missed its final five shots and turned the ball over three times in that span.
NEWS AND NOTES
The Ivy League season kicks off this weekend in Cambridge, where Harvard will look to avenge a 75-66 overtime home loss to Dartmouth last season. The rest of the Ivy League either kicks off the following weekend or at the end of the month in the case of Penn and Princeton…Both Harvard and Cornell currently sit at 2-2 versus the RPI top 100, while both teams’ RPI and road records are better than any of the first four out teams…Pomeroy’s conference projections show both Cornell and Harvard finishing 12-2, which, if it were to happen, would set up the first Ivy playoff since the 2001-02 season and would be the first not involving Penn or Princeton.
