In a matchup Saturday between the Ivy men’s best three-point shooting team, Cornell, and the league’s best perimeter defense, Dartmouth, the Big Red turned in one of their worst long-range shooting games of the season, falling by a 102-91 margin.
Dartmouth (8-7, 2-0 Ivy) overcame the absence of its leading scorer Kareem Thomas to notch its first 100-point game of the season versus a Division I opponent. Cornell (7-8, 0-2), meanwhile, has now allowed four teams to reach 100 points in a game, including each of its first two Ivy League opponents.
Dartmouth topped its season-long scoring average by 24 points.
From the start, Cornell looked disjointed on both sides of the court. On a set play, Dartmouth’s Jackson Munro easily screened Cornell defender Jacob Beccles off Connor Amundsen for an open three, the first of 14 triples that Dartmouth would score on the day.
Half of those three-pointers would come from Jayden Williams, who finished with a season-high 24 points.
By the first media timeout, Dartmouth had built a double-digit lead, creating turnovers with active defense that cracked open transition offense for the Big Green.
It looked like a page from the playbook that Cornell has used many times to make Newman Arena a house of horrors for Ivy League visitors. Since the start of the 2021-22 season, Cornell has won 44 of 55 games at home. Following consecutive losses to Columbia and now Dartmouth, the Newman Arena mystique might be fading.
Across a two-minute span in the first half, Dartmouth hit four consecutive threes with little defensive pressure affecting any of those shots.
The best stretch of the game for Cornell straddled the closing stretch of the first half and the start of the second half, during which Jake Fiegen and Cooper Noard showed why they are two of the best all-around scorers in the league. After halftime, a Fiegen three gave Cornell its first lead of the game, and a Noard three gave Cornell its largest lead of the game at 59-55.
Dartmouth promptly responded with a 14-3 run during a span where Cornell struggled to generate consistent offense through anyone not named Fiegen or Noard.
Meanwhile, five Dartmouth players scored in double figures.
Cornell tried some full-court press and some 2-3 zone defense. None of it seemed to affect what Dartmouth wanted to do on offense, especially underneath the basket.
Trailing by eight with 6:38 to go, Cornell’s Josh Baldwin chipped in with some nice help defense to swat away an Amundsen floater in the lane. With four seconds remaining on the shot clock, an Amundsen inbounds pass found Williams open at the perimeter while Munro sealed off two Cornell defenders, Baldwin and Noard. The score by Williams swelled Dartmouth’s lead back to double figures.
Over the next three minutes of play, Dartmouth extended the lead all the way to 18 points before cruising to victory.