Yale men’s basketball bows to Gonzaga in battle of the Bulldogs, 86-71

Yale junior guard Bez Mbeng played a team-high 34 minutes in his team’s loss at Gonzaga Friday, notching 10 points on 4-for-10 shooting, three assists and three steals. (Photo by Erica Denhoff)

Statistics don’t lie, and two of them stand out in Gonzaga’s 86-71 home win over Yale Friday night.

The Zags outrebounded Yale 42-28, and they outscored them 44-20 in the paint.
Yale punched the other Bulldogs in the mouth at the start, building a 16-6 lead. But the Zags clawed back to gain a 47-42 halftime advantage before a raucous McCarthey Athletic Center crowd of 6,000.

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Princeton men top Rutgers, 68-61, in first meeting since 2013

When two teams play and one team has three players who would be stars on the other team, the former team normally wins. Form held true in Trenton Monday night as Princeton men’s basketball defeated Rutgers, 68-61, in Princeton’s first meeting with the Scarlet Knights since 2013 in what was called the “Jersey Jam.”

Those three players? Matt Allocco, Caden Pierce and Xaivian Lee. All three Tigers would start for Rutgers and probably five or six other Big Ten teams.

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Not just nitpicking over NIT-picking

Dan Gavitt is NCAA senior vice president of basketball and NIT board chair. (MIT Sloan Sports Analytics Conference)

Editor’s note: Dan Gavitt is the son of the great Dave Gavitt, the driving force behind the creation of the Big East. The younger Gavitt is NIT board chair and NCAA senior vice president of basketball, and he has backed a new NIT policy which eliminates the automatic bid for mid-major conference champions who do not win their conference tournaments.

Dear Dan:

What would your father say?

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Q&A with Yale men’s senior forward Matt Knowling

 Yale men’s senior forward Matt Knowling led the Ivy League in field-goal percentage last season. (Photo by Erica Denhoff)

Matt Knowling is a Yale senior from Ellington, Conn. who was a unanimous All-Ivy first-team selection last season. Ivy Hoops Online sat down with him to discuss the upcoming season and other issues:                   

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Q&A with Yale women’s coach Dalila Eshe

Ivy Hoops Online caught up with Yale women’s coach Dalila Eshe, who is entering her second season at the helm in New Haven. The Bulldogs went 13-14 overall and 7-7 in Ivy League play in 2022-23, a fifth-place finish that wasn’t enough to qualify for the conference tournament. Yale was picked to again finish fifth in the conference in the Ivy League Women’s Basketball Preseason Media Poll released Oct. 12.   

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Yale men’s basketball enters Jones’ 25th year at the helm loaded

Junior guard Bez Mbeng, who coach James Jones has told Ivy Hoops Online is the best on-ball defender he’s ever coached, is among the many talented veterans on Yale men’s basketball’s 2023-24 roster. (Photo by Erica Denhoff)

Seems like you can never have too much money or happiness in life.

The same goes for depth in team sports.

We’ll find out about this last adage in March, as Yale men’s basketball may actually have too much depth. Sound impossible? Not really.

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A close look at Dartmouth men’s basketball’s unionization effort

Nearly a decade ago, members of the Northwestern football team tried to unionize.

The National Labor Relations Board, an independent federal agency charged with protecting employees’ rights to organize and determining whether to have unions as their bargaining representatives, voted unanimously in Aug. 2015 to decline to assert jurisdiction in the case. The NLRB held that asserting jurisdiction over a single team wouldn’t promote stability in labor relations league-wide, as the NCAA and conference maintain significant control over individual teams.

The NLRB noted the decision applied only to the players in the case and didn’t preclude reconsideration of this issue in the future.

Fast forward to 2021, when the United States Supreme Court decided in a 9-0 ruling that antitrust laws prohibit the NCAA from limiting its Division I schools from offering “education-related compensation or benefits” to student-athletes.

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Q&A with Yale men’s coach James Jones post-Greece trip

Yale men’s basketball coach James Jones led his squad a 3-0 showing in Greece this month. (Photo by Erica Denhoff)

Yale men’s basketball went 3-0 on its summer three-game, 10-day trip to Greece it wrapped Monday, led by a surprise leading scorer, sophomore forward Nick Townsend. The Bulldogs opened play by besting the Thessaloniki All-Stars, 91-75, before 89-79 and 100-94 wins over the University of Calgary, wrapping . We caught up with coach James Jones, who is entering his 25th year at Yale’s helm, upon his return:

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