It’s usually the Saturday game in the Ivy League back-to-backs when teams have to win ugly, but the Harvard men had to do so on Friday.
In a game in which both offenses struggled, the Crimson survived a game-tying triple at the buzzer to escape with a 56-53 victory over Brown in front of a Hawaiian shirt-wearing Aloha Night crowd at Lavietes Pavilion.
Harvard (14-9, 7-2 Ivy) extended its winning streak to a season-best four games and remained tied for first with Yale, which will pay a visit on Saturday for a 6:30 p.m. nationally televised game on ESPNU.
The Bears (7-15, 1-8), meanwhile, lost their sixth in a row and remained in last place, two games out of seventh. Bruno hopes to get back in the win column for the first time since Jan. 17 when it travels to fifth-place Dartmouth.
After three early ties, the Crimson went on a 12-0 run to open up a 24-12 lead with just over seven minutes to go.
The lead was upped to 13 before Brown outscored Harvard 15-5 between the end of the first half and start of the second to cut the deficit to three, 34-31.
This was a positive situation for a Bears team that has had difficulties closing out the opening 20 minutes and getting off to a good start in the next 20.
The Crimson stretched their advantage to 10 with just over six minutes left in the second stanza, but Bruno recovered to get it back to a four-point game, 54-50, with 2:15 left in regulation.
With both teams forcing passes and shots, the score remained the same entering the final 30 seconds.
Brown recovered a missed Harvard free throw and brought the ball up, but the referee mistakenly stopped play for a timeout that Bears head coach Mike Martin never actually called.
When play resumed, Brown had two chances from beyond the arc and the second one, coming from the hands of junior guard Malcolm Wrisby-Jefferson, hit the bottom of the net to make it a 54-53 game with 4.6 seconds on the clock.
This time, Martin walked up to the referee and emphasized the team’s final timeout.
Sophomore guard Tey Barbour was fouled after securing the inbounds pass and calmly sank both free throws to make it a three-point contest.
Without any timeouts left, sophomore guard Jeremiah Jenkins raced across the court and found an open Isaiah Langham on the right elbow. The rookie guard launched a shot from beyond the arc, but it fell short of the basket.
Harvard entered the night shooting 53.3% from two, 37.2% from three (No. 35 nationally) and a nation-best 82.3% from the free throw line, but those numbers were a disappointing 44.4% (12-for-27) from inside the arc, 31.2% (7-for-22) from outside the arc and 61.1% (11-for-18) from the charity stripe.
“It got hectic because we missed our free throws,” sophomore guard Robert Hinton told ESPN+ after the game when asked to describe the last few minutes of action. “That’s exactly the first thing coach (Tommy) Amaker is going to be telling us in the gym.”
While the Crimson had trouble collectively, the team’s super sophs had excellent individual performances to lead the way.
Hinton topped all scorers with 20 points on 58.3% (7-for-12) shooting from the field and 71.4% (5-for-7) from the free throw, and Barbour added 17 on a 50% performance from the field and an 80% effort from the charity stripe.
On the other side of the court, Brown managed to connect on 57.6% (19-for-33) of its twos, but its poor 11.1% (2-for-18) performance from three and 60% (9-for-15) shooting from the line made it too difficult to ultimately come out on top.