Penn Season Preview – YouthQuake

What happened last year (11-17, 5-9): Last year, Penn fans got pretty much all they could expect from the Quakers in Steve Donahue’s first year as head coach of the Quakers. Penn got off to a 4-1 nonconference start and even climbed to 5-5 in league play before dropping the last four games of the season.

Two white-knuckle losses to Princeton (including blowing a 97.6 percent win probability after leading 64-55 with 3:02 left in the first matchup at the Palestra), perhaps even more than Penn’s conference wins, provided a glimpse of what the Quakers could be more consistently under Donahue going forward:

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Columbia’s 2016-17 best-case scenario

Columbia’s run to the CIT title, including a semifinal win over NJIT and Jim Engles, felt like catharsis for a class that had seen its fair share of ups and downs.

Now it’s November and the leaders behind that run are gone: Kyle Smith to San Francisco, Maodo Lo and Alex Rosenberg to overseas contracts, Grant Mullins to Cal, and Isaac Cohen to the working world. So if everyone hits their 99th percentile performance in Morningside Heights this season, what can we expect? A group whose most experienced players are bigs and a coach who promises to run at a breakneck pace (at least compared to Kyle Smith’s) is a recipe for either the greatest incarnation of Seven Seconds or Less ever, or at least the most hilarious one. We do not know what Columbia’s lineup will look like. We do not know which freshmen will be able to contribute starting Friday at Stony Brook. What we do know is if everything goes according to plan, Columbia is going to win the Ivy title in the most ridiculous way possible.

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Columbia Season Preview – Watermarks and Engles

What happened last year (25-10, 10-4): Columbia was expected to vie for last year’s Ivy title with Yale and Princeton, but an overtime loss at home to Princeton midseason relegated Columbia to a lower tier within the conference and a CIT appearance. Columbia made the most of the CIT, though, winning the tournament and sending off the four that roared – Isaac Cohen, Maodo Lo, Grant Mullins and Alex Rosenberg as champions. Then Kyle Smith subsequently left to coach at San Francisco, and Jim Engles from NJIT was tapped to succeed him.

What’s new: With the four that roared gone, senior forward Luke Petrasek will likely be asked to shoulder much more of the offensive burden than he did a year ago, but more on that later.

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Dartmouth Season Preview – Turnover in Hanover

What happened last year: (10-18, 4-10 Ivy): Dartmouth was expected to take a step back after notching its first postseason appearance since 1959 in 2015, particularly after Gabas Maldunas’ graduation and Alex Mitola’s transfer. And the Big Green did, via a five-game skid in late January and early February, followed back-to-back overtime losses at Brown and Yale. After the season, Dartmouth Athletic Director Harry Sheehy dismissed coach Paul Cormier, who was six years into his second stint in Hanover. Cormier had gone 54-116 (.318) overall and 23-61 (.274) in his second stint in Hanover. The Big Green had gradually improved during his tenure, but Sheehy told the Dartmouth in an outstanding piece by Alexander Agadjanian that he wanted to see greater player development and recruiting, prompting him to choose a different direction for the program.

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Q&A interview with Columbia coach Jim Engles

 

Jim Engles comes back to Columbia to helm the program after five years as an assistant there from 2003-08. (USA Today Sports)
Jim Engles has come back to Columbia to helm the program after five years as an assistant there from 2003 to 2008. (USA Today Sports)

IHO’s Sam Tydings caught up with first-year Columbia head coach Jim Engles, who took over the Lions’ program in April after eight years as head coach at NJIT, ironically after Columbia defeated NJIT en route to the 2016 CIT title. Engles discussed 2016-17 team leaders, what pace he wants the Lions to play at and why he’s not talking about winning with his players at the moment:

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Cornell Season Preview – The Big Red reset

What happened last year: (10-18, 3-11 Ivy) Cornell was projected to finish last in the league and did just that despite a 2-2 start to league play that included back-to-back wins over Harvard and Dartmouth fueled by freshman phenom Matt Morgan. With a nine-game Ivy skid doing the Big Red’s season in, coach Bill Courtney was dismissed after going 60-113 in six years in Ithaca.

What’s new: The coach, for one. Princeton playing legend and all-star assistant Brian Earl jumped at the opportunity to lead a program, taking over the reins from Courtney and poised to make the Big Red less frenetic at both ends of the floor over time. The team’s lone freshman, Josh Warren, reportedly brings with him a comfort level in the post that the Big Red often lacked last season, and he also brings with him a natural rivalry with Penn freshman Ryan Betley. (Warren and Betley both attended Downington West in Downington, Pa.) But as a Courtney recruit, Warren apparently prefers an up-tempo style, which leads us to …

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Float like a butterfly, live by the three

penn-butterfly

Maturation.

It comes in many forms.  Caterpillar to chrysalis to beautiful butterfly: Whether it’s an insect, person, business, or athletic team, it is a necessary transformation for survival. No entity on the planet is exempt: evolve or perish.

This will be a curiously critical year for Quaker Basketball because it will show whether Steve Donahue, with his first true recruiting class, can be competitive in the increasingly upwardly mobile Ivy League. Evidence of institutional growth, something that consistently eluded Jerome Allen’s teams and consequently vexed and frustrated the Penn fan base, will soon be on full display as the season progresses. True, the Quakers will be a young squad (11 of the 19 players will be either freshmen or sophomores), but that should not significantly mask whether they will be able to take that next crucial step back toward Ivy hoops relevance. Of course, there will be growing pains but I, unlike the perpetually lugubrious Penn Basketball message boards, am unusually sanguine about this team.

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Brown Season Preview – Bruno scars

What happened last year: (8-20, 3-11 Ivy) The Bears’ 2015-16 season was underwhelming overall. Brown tied for last in the conference despite being projected to finish fifth in the preseason media poll with two-time Ivy Defensive Player of the Year Cedric Kuakumensah still in tow and an unusual level of offensive depth. But a five-game skid in league play in February followed back-to-back 24-point losses to Yale and Princeton in the Bears’ second and third conference matchups, a tough slog for Brown.

What’s new: Kuakumensah is gone after leading the league in blocks and three-point percentage as well as ranking second in rebounding last season. Say howdy to freshmen forwards Joshua Howard and David Erebor as well as rookie center Brandon Charnov and frosh guard Brandon Anderson, who selected Brown over Columbia. Most of Brown’s offensive playmakers return, but the Bears were projected to finish last in the conference in this year’s preseason media poll, probably because of Brown’s distinct lack of defensive fortitude last season.

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Q&A with Princeton coach Mitch Henderson

Editor’s Note: Our Toothless Tiger, George Clark, caught up with Princeton coach Mitch Henderson one-on-one at Jadwin Gym in late September for a comprehensive interview revealing what to expect from Princeton this season as the Tigers look to live up to their No. 1 Ivy preseason ranking. (Please excuse the technical difficulty separating Parts 1 and 2 – it’s presented intact because it demonstrates how gracious Henderson is and was in real time throughout the interview.)

Part 1

  • how Henderson feels about the Ivy postseason tournament and Penn’s potential for participating as host


Part 2

  • Henderson’s trust in former assistant and current Cornell head coach Brian Earl during games
  • what Kerry Kittles’ role is as a new assistant for Princeton
  • which Pete Carril quote from the 1991 Princeton media guide pertains to the 2016-17 Tigers
  • why Hans Brase is “the edge”
  • how Spencer Weisz has followed in T.J. Bray’s footsteps
  • what to look for from Princeton’s freshman class
  • what’s behind Princeton’s brutal nonconference schedule

Preseason pole position belongs to Princeton

Mitch Henderson enters his sixth season as the head coach of his alma mater with a great deal at stake. Regarded as one of the best young coaches in the country, he has enjoyed tremendous success, always finishing in the Ancient Eight’s first division. His teams have feasted on the league’s lesser lights, while faltering, sometimes catastrophically, against Harvard and Yale. And that’s the rub.

Harvard and Yale have won or shared the Ivy title during Henderson’s tenure at Jadwin, accounting for two-thirds of the Tigers’ 21 Ivy losses in the last five seasons (against 49 wins). The Tigers hope they can replicate the recent experiences of James Jones’ Yale quintets. Denied an outright title two years ago by an otherworldly loss in the final seconds of the season finale at Dartmouth, the Bulldogs then lost a tense playoff against Harvard. The 2015-16 Yale club rebounded brilliantly to win the Ivy crown with a stellar 13-1 record, suffering its lone conference defeat at the hands of the Tigers at Jadwin, 75-63.

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