“Going Through the Fire”

Harvard men’s basketball splits opening-weekend games.

Freshman Corey Johnson sank five three-pointers against Providence on Saturday, the most by any Harvard player since then-senior Laurent Rivard sank six in 2014.
Freshman Corey Johnson sank five three-pointers against Providence on Saturday, the most by any Harvard player since then-senior Laurent Rivard sank six in 2014.
Photograph by Gil Talbot/Harvard Athletic Communications
With 13 points and 16 rebounds, junior Zena Edosomwan registered the first double-double of his career on Saturday night. His production will be crucial as the team continues non-conference play.
With 13 points and 16 rebounds, junior Zena Edosomwan registered the first double-double of his career on Saturday night. His production will be crucial as the team continues non-conference play.
Photograph by Gil Talbot/Harvard Athletic Communications
Captain Evan Cummins ’16 dished out five assists against Providence, helping to implement head coach Tommy Amaker's "inside-out" offense.
Captain Evan Cummins ’16 dished out five assists against Providence, helping to implement head coach Tommy Amaker's "inside-out" offense.
Photograph by Gil Talbot/Harvard Athletic Communications

In November 2007, in just his sixth game as Harvard’s coach, Tommy Amaker and the men’s basketball team faced off against Providence College, a traditional power from the more-prominent Big East Conference. The matchup provided an early barometer of whether the Crimson could fulfill Amaker’s vision of competing at the national level. The results were dispiriting: Harvard lost 93-70, as the Friars scored 54 points in the second half. 

Since then, Amaker’s squad has enjoyed enormous success, winning five straight Ivy League championships, reaching four consecutive NCAA tournaments, and twice cracking the national top-25 rankings.

But this past Saturday, Amaker and his team faced a situation remarkably similar to the one posed by that first matchup: following the graduation of seven of last year’s Ivy League champion players, can Harvard still compete at a national level? If paired with the Crimson’s 59-39 drubbing of MIT the night before, Harvard’s competitive performance in a 76-64 loss against the Friars suggests that the answer is yes. Although Harvard is extremely young and inexperienced, the team exhibited the ability to implement Amaker’s offensive and defensive strategies—coupled with tenacity and impressive individual talent. Those attributes will not guarantee another Ivy League crown, but they are an excellent foundation on which to build. 

 

Harvard Hardwood
Sign up for Harvard Magazine’s basketball e-mail and follow the Crimson all season long! David L. Tannenwald ’08 will provide the latest news, game summaries, and insights as the Crimson chase another Ivy title and NCAA berth!

A Defensive Stand 

When the team began its season last Friday evening against MIT, the scene at Harvard’s Lavietes Pavilion was slightly different from years past, when Harvard has benefitted from a boisterous student section. This time, the MIT faithful were a forceful presence. In another change, Amaker—who typically dressed in an open-collared shirt on the sideline—was wearing a necktie. More substantively, the number 23, worn for the past four years by all-conference star Wesley Saunders ’15, now belonged to Weisner Perez, one of three freshmen who played substantial minutes on Friday night. (His classmates Corey Johnson and Tommy McCarthy were in the starting lineup.)

The new-look Crimson resembled their predecessors in one crucial way: they played suffocating defense, particularly during a 10-minute period in the second half when Harvard went on 26-4 run to expand a 26-24 lead to a 24-point advantage. For a quarter of the game, MIT barely scored. “It’s been a calling card in our program, and it’s part of our identity,” Amaker said after the game, “and it’s so important for us to feel like we’ve lived up to that defensively.”  

The defensive pressure also demonstrated the prowess of Harvard guards, chiefly McCarthy. Following a season-ending injury to star point guard Siyani Chambers ’16, McCarthy—who registered a steal during the Crimson’s pivotal second-half run—showed that he has the ability, like Chambers, to command the defense. (With 12 points, McCarthy also led the Crimson in scoring, rounding out a performance in which Amaker lauded the young point guard for showing “pizazz.”)

But the team’s stout defense revealed above all what seniors Evan Cummins and Agunwa Okolie described as a sense of “urgency.” That the squad is playing with such intensity, and that his senior leaders are articulating the significance of doing so, suggests that Amaker’s message has resonated. One week removed from a surprisingly close 69-66 win in an exhibition game against McGill, Harvard’s 20-point thumping of MIT represented a return to form. 

A Stiffer Challenge

The victory over MIT, however, comes with an asterisk. The Engineers are a Division III team (albeit one of the best in the country at that level), and the Crimson was expected to defeat them handily. Saturday’s matchup in Providence represented a far stiffer challenge. The talented Friars lineup is led by point guard Kris Dunn, a potential national player of the year.

Dunn stuffed the stat line with 32 points, eight steals, five assists, and six rebounds. He also dominated when it mattered most. After Harvard tied the game at 41 on junior Zena Edosomwan’s dunk with 14 minutes to play, the Friar’s star scored 14 points in a 18-5 Providence run that put the game out of reach.

Harvard had no answer for Dunn, and the Crimson’s 22 turnovers were alarming, but the team came away from the game with two major positives. Heading into a matchup that some thought would blow the Crimson off the court, the players remained competitive against a nationally relevant program for three-quarters of the game. They also demonstrated the ability to do something last year’s team often struggled with: implementing Amaker’s inside-out offense.

During the 2014-2015 Ivy League title campaign, the Crimson often passed the ball around the perimeter until late in the shot clock, at which point Saunders or Chambers would try to break down the opposing defense. This partly reflected their extraordinary talent, but also hinted at one of that team’s shortcomings: it had only one bona fide three-point threat, Corbin Miller ’15 (’17). That meant other teams could mark him on the perimeter and pack four defenders close to the basket, daring Saunders or Chambers to shoot from distance or drive into a crowded lane.

On Saturday, this year’s squad learned that it has at least two players who can shoot the three. Miller sank three treys against the Friars, while newcomer Johnson, who had nailed three three-pointers against MIT, made five long-distance shots against Providence—the most by a Harvard player in a single game since Laurent Rivard ’14, the school’s all-time leading three-point shooter, sank six in a contest in 2014.

With Providence forced to guard Harvard’s perimeter shooters more closely, the Crimson guards were able to get the ball inside through dribble penetration and passes to the post. Harvard’s big men then delivered: Cummins demonstrated a deft passing touch, dishing to Edosomwan in the second half for an uncontested dunk. And Edosomwan, despite struggling at the free-throw line, had the first double-double of his career, with 13 points and 16 rebounds.

Harvard did not get the result it wanted on Saturday night, but its offensive performance against a talented foe bodes well.

“Going Through The Fire” 

Can Harvard manage to decrease mistakes (turnovers and missed free throws) and improve enough to sustain Amaker’s defensive and offensive systems throughout a full game by the start of conference play in January? 

If the opening weekend of college basketball is any indication, that will be imperative—because the rest of the league is as good as advertised. Yale, which shared the Ivy League title with Harvard last season, won its opener against Fairfield behind a strong performance from sophomore Makai Mason. Princeton pulled away from a tough Rider University team for a 64-56 win. And Dartmouth, expected by most to finish in the bottom half of the conference, hung tough with Seton Hall (eventually losing 84-67), another high-major opponent, thanks to 25 points from freshman Evan Boudreaux.

For now, the Crimson remains focused on its non-league slate, which continues with a game at home against the University of Massachusetts on Tuesday and a visit to Boston College on Sunday. Members of the highly competitive Atlantic 10 and Atlantic Coast Conferences, respectively, UMass and BC have traditionally ranked above Harvard in the local college basketball pecking order. Under Amaker, though, Harvard defeated UMass last year and won six straight matchups with BC before faltering against the Eagles last January.

The contests will also provide Harvard with an opportunity to improve. As Amaker explained after the Providence game, his freshmen and less experienced upperclassmen are “going through the fire” as they learn what it takes to play high-level college basketball.

Tidbits

  • On Friday, Harvard Athletics announced that the Crimson will begin the 2016-2017 season with a game against Stanford in Shanghai for the Pac-12 conference’s second annual China Game. The matchup will pit Amaker against former Duke teammate and current Stanford coach Johnny Dawkins.
  • The Harvard women’s basketball team began its season this past Friday, with a 64-53 loss at home against Maine. The Crimson was led by Shilpa Tummala ’16, who scored 17 points and sank five three-pointers. Harvard also benefitted from strong performances by freshmen Sydney Skinner, who started at point guard, and Madeline Raster, who played 31 minutes off the bench. Head coach Kathy Delaney-Smith, beginning her thirty-fourth season, lauded the team’s seven freshmen for “how hard they compete.” She also emphasized that she is excited to know that the full team will “learn from what went wrong [in the first game] and then realize how good we can be if we keep going forward.”
  • Throughout the season, the men’s and women’s basketball teams will wear patches on their uniforms with the initials “TS” to honor Thomas G. Stemberg ’71, M.B.A. ’73. A long-time supporter of Harvard basketball, Stemberg—who endowed the men’s basketball head coaching position last season—passed away last month.

David L. Tannenwald ’08 is a Cambridge-based writer.

Read more articles by: David L. Tannenwald

You might also like

Harvard College Admits Class of 2028

A smaller undergraduate applicant cohort—the first since Supreme Court ended affirmative action 

Studying ChatGPT Like a Psychologist

Cognitive science helps penetrate the AI “black box”

Reparations as Public Health

A Harvard forum on the racial health gap

Most popular

Harvard College Admits Class of 2028

A smaller undergraduate applicant cohort—the first since Supreme Court ended affirmative action 

Diagnosis by Fiction

The “Healing Quartet,” by “Samuel Shem,” probes medicine—and life.

AWOL from Academics

Behind students' increasing pull toward extracurriculars

More to explore

Darker Days

The current disquiets compared to Harvard’s Vietnam-era traumas

Making Space

The natural history of Junko Yamamoto’s art and architecture

Spellbound on Stage

Actor and young adult novelist Aislinn Brophy