The Dow Jones Industrial Average and NASDAQ were looking up at the end of last week, but more importantly, it’s a good time to be bullish about Ivy League basketball. There’s going to be an actual Ivy hoops season this year, and we’re here to herald its return together. Here’s how Ivy Hoops Online contributors feel about some of the storylines within that greater, happy story as the 2021-22 campaign approaches.
Rob Browne:
Buy
- A season without any COVID-19-related cancellations
- James Jones gets the Yale men into the top four for the 21st straight year
- Columbia men improve upon their 2020 league win total (one)
- The Brown or Dartmouth men (or both) make it into the men’s Ivy League Tournament for the first time
- The Columbia women will play in the Ivy League Tournament for the first time after earning a berth in 2020’s canceled tourney
- The Harvard men’s and women’s teams earn slots in the Ivy tourneys to be held at Lavietes Pavilion
- The men’s Player of the Year is a grad student or someone who took their senior year off in 2020-21
- The women’s Player of the Year is someone who stayed in school during 2020-21
No women’s or men’s team goes undefeated in league play (the Princeton women were 14-0 in 2020)
Hold
- Bands performing at Ivy contests
- Jelani Williams finally having an injury-free season at Penn after three ACL tears dating back to his senior year of high school
- A season without any weather-related cancellations
Sell
- Zoom postgame press conferences for league games
- League continuing the 2021-22 policy allowing graduate student-athletes to use last year of eligibility at their undergraduate school
- Jimmy Boeheim locks his father and brother in the locker room, switches uniforms and leads Cornell to the upset win at the Carrier Dome in December
- To encourage a greater commitment to fighting climate change, the Ivy League gives its first ever Greta Thunberg Award to Monique LeBlanc, whose Brown team has no nonconference contests outside New England
- After the success of Macquarie Court at the Palestra, new Brown athletic director Grace Calhoun seals the deal on Del’s Lemonade Court at the Pizzitola Sports Center
Erica Denhoff:
Buy
Yale men’s basketball and Princeton women’s basketball winning the regular season championships and Ivy Madness.
Hold
Any of the teams getting any meaningful nonconference wins. There’s a lot of uncertainty resulting from the March 2020 to November 2021 hiatus.
Sell
The new Ivy conference schedule format. The conference schedule will move to a 10-week schedule and league’s back-to-back weekends will be included only three times. Many Ivy basketball traditionalists (myself included) will miss the format that we grew up with.
Richard Kent:
Buy
The Columbia women: Megan Griffith is in her sixth season at her alma mater after spending six seasons as a trusted assistant coach at Princeton. In 2019-20, the Lions posted a 17-10 mark and an 8-6 ledger in the Ivy to qualify for the first time for an Ivy Tournament which never took place. This season, Columbia returns sophomore sensation Abbey Hsu, a second-team All-Ivy selection in 2020, and junior Sienna Durr, the 2019 Ivy League Rookie of the Year, plus a strong incoming recruiting class led by Duke transfer Jaida Patrick. Yale women’s coach Allison Guth calls the Lions ”extremely talented, experienced and well-coached.” Look for Columbia to earn an Ivy tourney berth in March.
Hold
The Yale men: I mean you could buy them, but you probably already did in 2016. You can’t buy them again. The Elis are once again a favorite to win the Ivy title and make it to the Big Dance. Even without stud Paul Atkinson, who will suit up as the best player for Notre Dame, Yale is coming off back-to-back Ivy championships in 2019 and 2020.
Sell
All teams that won’t schedule an Ivy opponent, you know who you are. You reside in every state on the East Coast. You deem it a problem to potentially explain to your athletic director and your fans that you have lost to an Ivy league team. Take the Yale men, for example. No Division I team in the state of Connecticut will play them. That’s right, no one. Not UConn. Not Fairfield. Not Central Connecticut State. Not Hartford. Not Sacred Heart. Well, let’s step back for a moment and give Sacred Heart coach Anthony Latina some credit. His Pioneers will secret scrimmage the powerful Elis this month.