Report: League officials makes changes to the Ivy Tournament

As the college basketball world gets ready to tip off on Tuesday night, the Ivy League has its eyes on its end-of-year tournament.

The Philadelphia Inquirer’s Jonathan Tannenwald reported late Monday morning that the conference has decided to move each of the women’s events up one day making Ivy Madness a four-day event.

Prior to the 2018 Ivy Tournament, the Harvard Magazine’s David Tannenwald wrote “A Gendered Schedule”, a piece that described the frustration that a number of Ivy women’s basketball coaches had with the schedule from the inaugural tournament in 2017.  That year, the women’s semifinals were played in the late morning and evening, book-ending the men’s semifinals. Despite the conference’s best intentions, the coaches and their teams felt like second-class citizens in an event that was supposed to reflect equality.

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Cornell has large shoes to fill as it moves on without Matt Morgan

It’s no question that the Cornell Big Red will look a lot different on the floor this season. The Big Red no longer have their four-time leading scorer in Matt Morgan, as well as their top defender and rebounder in Steven Julian. Both are now professionals, and have extremely large shoes to fill.

Junior Jimmy Boeheim and senior Josh Warren are in leadership roles in 2019, also expected to be the Big Red’s top scoring options. The two are team captains along with junior guard Terrance McBride.

Morgan facilitated the Big Red offense all four years on East Hill, but now Terrance McBride will be doing so.

However, those three won’t be able to take over the scoring load alone. The Big Red will rely on a variety of players to do so.

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Myles Stephens, Kyle Castlin and Trey Phills picked in NBA G League Draft

Add three more Ivy grads to the NBA G League.

Princeton’s Myles Stephens was the first to go off the board with the number 10 pick in the 2nd round of Saturday’s G League Draft by the Long Island Nets.  Columbia’s Kyle Castlin, who completed a graduate transfer year at Xavier, was chosen with the 17th pick of the 2nd round by the Salt Lake City Stars.  Yale’s Trey Phills went to the Windy City Bulls with 18th pick in the fourth and final round.

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Ivy 60 for 60: Ron Haigler

Ron Haigler averaged 18.7 points and 10.3 rebounds per game for his career, and Penn went to the NCAA Tournament in all three of his collegiate seasons.
Ivy Hoops Online announces the next entry in Ivy 60 for 60, our series running through 60 of the greatest players in Ivy League men’s basketball history after a hiatus to continue celebrating six decades of modern Ivy League basketball. An Ivy 60 for 60 for Ivy women’s basketball will follow.
Ron Haigler was the first great player of what could be called the “Penn Dynasty 2.0” (the Chuck Daly Era).
Dick Harter and his assistant, recruiter extraordinaire Digger Phelps, established Penn as both an Ivy dynasty and national power with their late ’60s recruiting of Dave Wohl, Steve Bilsky, Corky Calhoun and Bobby Morse among others. In 1971, after a 28-1 season during which Penn was ranked No. 3 in the Associated Press and reached what would now be considered the Elite 8, Harter and Phelps moved on to Oregon and Fordham, respectively. Future Hall of Fame coach Chuck Daly was hired to replace them and he was greeted with a very deep pool of talent led by future NBA player Phil Hankinson. These players were followed in short order by Bob Bigelow, John Engles and Ron Haigler.

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How to fix Ivy Madness

While Harvard and Yale were fighting for their March Madness lives in New Haven several months ago, I was flying (first class, of course) towards Asia in a hurtling, subsonic piece of aluminum. As we chased the sun eastward, I indolently pulled up my window shade and looked out upon the vast, barren, frigidness that is the Arctic Ocean. Then, through the miracle of Wi-Fi (you know, that powerful, invisible force that allows our planet to torment one another through magic), I proceeded to watch the Bulldogs dismantle their arch rivals before a, well, ”mostly filled” John J. Lee Amphitheater. Regardless of how the crowd appeared on site, I can assure you it did not “show well” at 33,000 feet on a 15-inch screen. In fact, the view from my window of Arctic Ocean seemed to be an appropriate metaphor for the vast sea of empty seats above the hardwood. (I exaggerate, naturally, but not too much.)

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Ivy League women’s basketball preseason power rankings

Ivy Hoops Online’s writing staff voted on where all eight Ivy women’s and men’s basketball teams would end up for the 2019-20 season. Our projected order of finish for the women:

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Ivy League player carousel

The biggest story of the off-season was Miye Oni being selected in June’s NBA Draft.  The Yale junior and reigning Ivy Player of the Year decided to leave school early and leave his name in the draft.  Despite falling to the late second round, a perilous spot to making an NBA roster, Oni impressed in the Summer League and earned a guaranteed contract with the Utah Jazz.  He is playing just as well in the pre-season and looks to be a real steal for the Jazz.

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Ivy League men’s basketball preseason power rankings

Ivy Hoops Online’s writing staff voted on where all eight Ivy men’s and women’s basketball teams would end up for the 2019-20 season. Our projected order of finish for the men (and the women’s rankings here):

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Ivy hoops roundup – Sept. 25, 2019

  • Princeton’s Bella Alarie completed her last 3×3 tournaments with USA Basketball with a silver medal effort in  Edmonton this past weekend and a bronze medal showing in Montreal in early September.  Overall, her team came in seventh place in the 28-team field.
    The two-time Ivy Player of the Year, who also picked up a silver medal with USA Basketball at this summer’s Pan American Games, continues to improve her stock as she heads into her final year for the Tigers.  Michelle Williams of the WNBA listed Alarie as one of the 12 potential first-round picks in next years’s Draft, while Howard Megdal of High Post Hoops had her as the number five pick for the Minnesota Lynx.
  • Harvard men’s coach Tommy Amaker told Jon Rothstein that 2018 men’s Ivy League Player of the Year, Seth Towns, has been cleared for non-contact work.  Towns, a co-captain of this year’s Crimson team, missed all of last year due to a knee injury sustained in the 2018 Ivy Tournament final against Penn.
    Earlier this month, the senior from Columbus, Ohio, was one of 16 players attending the NCAA Elite Student-Athlete Symposium for Men’s Basketball in Indianapolis.

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Ivy hoops roundup – Aug. 16, 2019

  • Princeton Bella Alarie and the rest of her USA teammates earned the silver medal at the recent Pan American Games in Lima, Peru.  The U.S. went 4-1 overall but lost the finals to Brazil, 79-73.  This is the second silver medal for the two-time Ivy Player of the Year, as she was a member of the U-19 FIBA World Cup team in the summer of 2017.
    Alarie finished the tournament averaging 6.6 points, 21.4 minutes and 5.6 rebounds a game.  Her four total blocks and eight steals led the team.  She shot 50% from two (15-for-30) and the free throw line (3-for-6), but missed all three attempts from beyond the arc.  After losing a 62-59 heartbreaker to the U.S. in the semifinals, Puerto Rico bounced back to defeat Columbia, 66-55, in the third-place game.
    Alarie wasn’t the only Ivy Leaguer to take part in the tournament.  Recent Dartmouth grad Isalys Quinones played for bronze medalist Puerto Rico.  Quinones, a second team All-Ivy forward in 2019, started four of the team’s five games and averaged 7.4 points, 4.2 rebounds, and 22.4 minutes per contest.
  • In other Pan American Games action, Brown head coach Mike Martin helped lead the USA men’s team to a bronze medal after a 92-83 victory over the Dominican Republic on August 4.

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