Harvard Hardwood, the Harvard Magazine basketball report
Last weekend, some of the sharpest minds in sports convened in Boston for the ninth-annual MIT Sloan Sports Analytics Conference.
After his team’s weekend split against Cornell and Columbia, Tommy Amaker, the Stemberg head coach for men’s basketball, might have wished that some of the attendees had stuck around to help him analyze why his team’s offense is so inconsistent.
In a game that was reminiscent of Harvard’s losses to Holy Cross, Arizona State, and Dartmouth earlier this year, the Crimson put forth an abysmal offensive performance in a 57-49 loss at Cornell on Friday. Twenty-four hours later, four Crimson players scored in double figures in an 80-70 win over Columbia.
Paired with Yale’s sweep of Penn and Princeton, Harvard’s split drops the Crimson (20-6) into a 10-2 tie atop the conference standings with Yale (21-8). It also means that Amaker has less than a week to ensure that his sharpest offensive squad shows up this Friday for the team’s rematch with Yale in what amounts to a de facto Ivy championship game.
Harvard Hardwood
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A Tactical Tradeoff
When Amaker arrived in Cambridge in 2007, the road to the Ivy League title went directly through Ithaca, New York. From 2008 through 2010, the Big Red captured three outright Ivy championships and never lost at home in conference play. Since then, Harvard has won four consecutive conference crowns, and the Big Red—which won only two games last year—have faded.
On Friday, Cornell put forth a vintage performance. In particular, senior Shonn Miller—who had notched just one field goal in his team’s 61-40 loss to Harvard in Cambridge two weeks ago—scored 24 points and hauled in 15 rebounds. The Crimson could not contain him.
In contrast, the Crimson reverted to a less attractive past form: as was the case in its losses in non-conference play, Harvard’s offense—which prizes frequent passing, movement off the ball, and interior penetration—was discontinuous; and roughly 40 percent of the team’s scoring came from Wesley Saunders ’15, who tallied 19 points.
The question becomes why Harvard periodically experiences these droughts.
In his post-game interview, Amaker suggested that the dismal display stemmed in part from an uncharacteristically poor shooting night. There’s certainly merit to this obvious explanation. The Crimson made just 25.4 percent of its field-goal attempts and missed nine of 23 free throws. Most notably, Corbin Miller ’15 (’17), a 78.6 percent free-throw shooter, missed three consecutive attempts after being fouled on a three-point attempt late in the second half.
Others argue that Amaker’s line-ups contribute to the team’s shooting woes. Michael James ’06, the former basketball writer for The Crimson, has presented extensive quantitative analysis on his popular Twitter feed, @Ivybball, suggesting that the team’s best offensive line-up is Miller, Saunders, Siyani Chambers ’16, Steve Moundou-Missi ’15, and Jonah Travis ’15; and that it is particularly important to have Miller, Chambers, and Saunders on the floor together. But the preferred five have only played together for 123 possessions this season (less than 10 percent of the Crimson’s total opportunities), and Miller continues to come off the bench (albeit with a hefty 25.5 minutes per game).
The chief argument against playing Travis and Miller more is that they typically substitute for Zena Edosomwan ’17 and Agunwa Okolie ’16, who are larger and more athletic defenders. But as Friday showed, even when the team plays well on defense, it cannot win without reliable scoring.
Leadership
On Saturday evening, Amaker and his players found themselves in an entirely different situation. An overnight bus ride had transported them from bucolic Ithaca to the bright lights of Manhattan. Whereas Cornell’s arena had more than 1,000 empty seats, Columbia’s gymnasium was sold out, and the crowd featured a raucous student section and celebrities like CBS sports analyst Clark Kellogg and Attorney General Eric Holder. Most importantly, although the Crimson had been alone atop the Ivy standings the night before, the team was now in a first-place tie with Yale.
Fortunately, the Crimson’s offense metamorphosed as well. From the opening tip, Chambers pushed the ball up the floor, helping Saunders and Moundou-Missi get baskets in transition. Harvard also sank 59 percent of its field-goal attempts and 76 percent of its free throws. As a result, the Crimson put four players in double figures in one of its most balanced offensive displays of the year.
The squad’s improved shooting lent some credence to Amaker’s suggestion that the team had simply been off the night before. That Miller featured prominently in the win (he hit three three-pointers to help the Crimson stave off a second-half Lions run) also substantiated James’s claim that the squad benefits from putting its best three-point shooter on the floor.
The team also won because of something more intangible: the leadership of senior co-captain Steve Moundou-Missi. Despite being a two-time All Ivy honoree and the Crimson’s leading rebounder, Moundou-Missi receives few accolades for his play and even less recognition for his leadership. Yet for the last year, he has been the team’s emotional anchor. A self-described “introvert,” the Cameroonian native reported that he learned to become more vocal while coaching youth basketball players last summer as an intern for the NBA in South Africa. While he rarely yells on the floor, he called the players-only meeting after Harvard’s home loss to Dartmouth that preceded its recent eight-game winning streak.
In Manhattan on Saturday, the senior let his game doing the talking. He led the Crimson on the glass with 11 rebounds and tallied 17 points, giving the team a rare offensive complement to Saunders, who scored a team-high 21. Even more important, Moundou-Missi played the most minutes (37) among Harvard players and was the only member of the Crimson to play the entire second half. He steadied the Crimson in a game on which their season hinged.
The Game
As difficult as it has been for the Crimson to play consistently this season, Amaker and his team will face their greatest tactical and mental challenge of the year in their rematch with Yale on Friday. As James noted in a phone interview, Amaker might feel inclined to play Okolie more (and Miller less) because Yale has several large, athletic guards. But if the Crimson puts forth another anemic offensive performance against Yale (Harvard scored just 52 points in New Haven) and cannot match its defensive prowess (Harvard held Yale to 50), it will lose.
Given that the winner of Friday night’s game will be guaranteed at least a share of the conference championship (and that if either team sweeps the weekend, it will win the conference title outright), it will be imperative for Amaker to figure out how to maximize Miller’s impact.
With such high stakes, leadership will be imperative, too. When Moundou-Missi and his teammates arrived in Cambridge, Harvard had not been to the NCAA tournament since 1946. Since then, they have led the Crimson to March Madness three times and helped the Crimson win its first two NCAA tournament games. With two wins this weekend, they can cement their legacy. This represents an enormous opportunity, but Moundou-Missi and his teammates will have to deal with the emotions of senior night, the weight of expectations, and the recognition that the Bulldogs—who have not been to the NCAA tournament since 1962—are hungry for a banner of their own.
It doesn’t take a statistics Ph.D. to tell you that this one is for all the marbles.
Tidbits
- The Harvard women’s basketball team defeated Cornell 60-54 on Friday night and overcame Columbia 82-81 on senior night on Saturday. Leading the way again for the Crimson was Erin McDonnell ’15, who scored 15 points against the Big Red and hit the game-winning three against the Lions. The Harvard women (12-14 overall, 5-7 Ivy) conclude their season on the road next weekend against Yale and Brown.
