PROVIDENCE, R.I. – The Cornell men’s basketball team can’t really explain what happened in a 39-point loss at Dartmouth exactly one month ago today.
It did know that, presented with a second opportunity, it would not happen again.
Second-seeded Cornell not only gained revenge but booked its place in the Ivy League Tournament final for the first time with an 87-71 win Saturday afternoon at the Pizzitola Sports Center.
“It really started the night before when we lost to Harvard and didn’t play well,” Cornell senior Nazir Williams said. “There were some things that happened that weekend that weren’t good and it showed on the court. We needed to reset and get back to the basketball we knew we could play. We obviously knew we were much better than that, and our coaches helped us understand that, we had a good week of practice, and we were back.”
That loss at Dartmouth, in which the Big Red trailed 21-2 and then 44-18 at the half, was a catalyst for Cornell (18-10), which has played some of its best basketball since, especially on the offensive end. Saturday’s win was its fifth straight and the first one in three that it hasn’t scored 100 points.
Dartmouth (14-14) grabbed its biggest lead of the day seven minutes in 11-6 Saturday, but after missing seven of its first eight from behind the arc, Cornell finally hit a couple, Jake Fiegen’s triple put the Big Red up 35-25 and they held a 45-37 edge at the break.
The Big Red came out firing after the break, when Ryan Kiachian and AK Okereke both hit driving layups, it was 62-46, Dartmouth coach David McLaughlin called time, and the Big Green never really recovered.
While Cornell finished 10-for-29 from behind the arc, it was inside the arc – as the Big Red have done all season – where they did most of their damage, finishing 22-for-31 and at 1.22 points per possession (after being at 0.64 ppp in that loss last month). The Big Red now lead the nation in two-point shooting at 60.8%.
Okerere led the charge with 25 points and nine rebounds, and Fiegen added 16. But there were big shots hit everywhere, and perhaps the biggest three-pointers of the day came when Dartmouth made a mini-second-half run and Jacob Beccles and Adam Hinton answered to kill any building momentum.
“I’m incredibly proud of our overall, who they are as young men, who they are as competitors, and their belief that we were going to have some success this season and take the program to a level it hasn’t seen in a long time,” McLaughlin said.
Jon Jaques becomes the first Ivy League coach to advance to the Ivy tourney final in his first season, a level his mentor Brian Earl never reached. Earl, however, built the Cornell program from a team at the bottom of the standings to a perennial Ivy Madness participant through an uptempo style (that Dartmouth tried to emulate in many ways this season), and he wants to finish what Earl started.
“The guys were confident playing a certain way (under Earl),” Jaques said. “I definitely wanted to stay true to that, what they knew and how they won a lot of games playing. I sort of hoped we would evolve as the year went on. The guys have probably helped me more than I’ve helped them this season, figuring out what they do well. We do some things differently, but we play fast and we try to be the team that plays hardest in the country. That hasn’t changed.”
For the Big Green, it ends a remarkable season that saw them picked almost unanimously dead last in the Ivy in the preseason (after going 6-21 and 2-12 in conference) and started 1-3 before posting its first Ivy winning record this century and making its first Ivy Madness appearance. Their NCAA Tournament drought reaches 67 years, but they end this season a lot closer from where they began.
Brandon Mitchell-Day, who will return, led Dartmouth with 20 points and seven rebounds, while Cornish – who was in foul trouble much of the day and eventually fouled out – finished with 15. Cornish, Romeo Myrthil and Cade Haskins graduate, but McLaughlin hope he’s built something just as Earl and now Jaques did at Cornell.
“I think the biggest thing we learned here is next season starts now,” McLaughlin said. “We met last year right after the season as a coaching staff, and we had some epic meetings. We went four straight days. We asked really hard questions, and asked ‘How are we going to change this?’ and ‘How are we going to get it to where we want it to be?’ Hopefully we learned how we want to play next year, and that starts now.”
The Big Red are through to their first Ivy final in their fourth trip and will be underdogs. But they have proven they can play with Yale, even if they lost both meetings.
“It will be a low-margin-for-error game, but we feel good with how we played them at their place,” Jaques said. “They made some plays down the stretch and we didn’t, and it will be a tall order, but we were right there last time.”
