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Yale completed its revenge tour of teams against defeated the Bulldogs earlier in the season with a decisive 76-58 win over Cornell at John J. Lee Amphitheater Saturday.
And oh, what a Senior Night it was for senior forward EJ Jarvis.
In a critical game in the fight for an Ivy Madness berth, the Cornell men’s offense never made the trip up to New Haven.
The Big Red scored fewer than 60 points for the second consecutive game, losing 76-58 to Yale for their fifth loss in the last six games
The loss takes Cornell out of the driver’s seat for the final spot in Ivy Madness.
Yale sophomore guard Bez Mbeng leads his team in assists at 4.1 per game and in steals with a total of 36. The 6-foot-4 Potomac, Md. native who coach James Jones told Ivy Hoops Online is the best on-ball defender he’s ever coached. IHO caught up with Mbeng for an interview in advance of Yale’s game against Cornell Saturday night:
Princeton led Yale 61-42 with 8:29 remaining in the game at Jadwin Gym Saturday night. The Bulldogs were missing leading scorer Matt Knowling with an ankle injury suffered the night before.
And yet Princeton could not finish at home to maintain sole possession of first place atop the Ivy League standings. In an instant classic, Yale completed a comeback neither program will soon forget to top the Tigers, 93-83, in overtime.
Yale, Princeton and Penn now share first place in the Ivy at 8-4 in league play.
It had all started so well for the hosts.
Penn is on the verge of a trip to the Ivy League Tournament after pulling off one of its most thrilling victories in years.
The Quakers (15-11, 7-4 Ivy) took down Yale, 66-64, Friday night in a classic Palestra matchup between two teams that have now split their home-and-home series for six consecutive seasons. The two teams exchanged the lead 14 times. Neither led by more than six points.
Penn took the lead for good when sophomore guard George Smith hit an open three at the top of the key off a nice feed from Max Martz to give the Quakers a 52-50 lead with 7:19 to go.
The end was a sequence of events that likely gave Penn fans heart palpitations. The Quakers held a four-point lead with less than 13 seconds to go, but let Bulldogs (17-7, 7-4) guard John Poulakidas hit an open three with about 5.8 seconds on the clock.
Penn got the ball inbounds without issue, but normally reliable free-throw shooter Clark Slajchert split a pair at the line. Despite getting a chance to tie or win the game, Yale could not get off a final shot before the buzzer sounded.
There’s a lot for Penn fans to process ahead of a Saturday night tilt against Brown, such as how …
A key injury spelled doom for Yale at the Palestra in a 66-64 loss to Penn Friday.
With 18 minutes left in the game and the score knotted at 33-33, Yale leading scorer Matt Knowling rolled his ankle. He would not return to the game and his status for tonight against Princeton is questionable.
Penn hung on in a defensive struggle featuring 14 lead changes in which Yale converted just three field goals in the final 5:26. The visitors’ fate was sealed when a fallaway shot landed off base after Yale got the ball back down two with 5.1 seconds left following a 1-for-2 trip to the foul line by Ivy League free-throw percentage leader Clark Slajchert.
Following Saturday afternoon’s action, the upper division pulled away from the bottom half, while the Brown rebuild took a positive step forward.
Columbia bounced back from a disappointing result against Princeton by taking it out on Yale in front of 1,485 fans at Levien Gymnasium. The Lions jumped out to a 32-17 halftime lead on the strength of a 14-0 second quarter run. The Light Blue made it a 20-point game after three and widen it to a game-high 28 points with just under four minutes to go in the contest. Defensively, they limited the Bulldogs to 32% shooting and only 49 points, the first time they held an Ivy opponent under 50 this season.
Week seven for the Ancient Eight saw Yale avenge its shocking opening day loss at Columbia and move into a tie at the top of the conference leaderboard. After a close half that saw the Bulldogs holding onto a slim 31-26 lead, the Bulldogs outscored the last-place Lions 58-32 for the dominant 31-point win. Yale, winners of six straight, had 13 different players in the scoring column and shot 65% from the field.
Yale women’s basketball gave up 97 points to high-octane Columbia when the teams met at John J. Lee Amphitheater on New Year’s Eve.
So giving up 74 points to the Lions showed a modicum of progress for the Bulldogs at Levien Gym Saturday.
The problem was that Columbia stymied Yale’s offense in a 74-46 clinic controlled by the home team.
On Friday night, league-leading Columbia continued its “Revenge Tour” by dominating Penn by 22 points at Levien Gymnasium, avenging a surprise four-point loss to the Quakers on January 7. The Crimson also had payback on their minds, as they traveled down to New Haven to take on a Yale team that defeated them 71-70 in overtime on that same January day. Harvard’s defense took control over the opening 20 minutes, limiting the Elis to 19% (0% from three) from the field and opening up a 33-13 halftime lead that the visitors could not overcome.
Meanwhile, Princeton, which entered the weekend tied for second with Penn and Harvard, rattled off a 17-5 run over a six-minute stretch of the third quarter to ring up a double-digit victory over Cornell. In the night’s remaining contest, Brown swept the season series over Dartmouth on the strength of 10 three-pointers.
The Big Red suffered another big third-quarter run, giving up 17 straight points to the Quakers on Saturday, as Penn took the second half of their Empire State weekend. Harvard methodically built a 26-point fourth-quarter lead and ended up winning by 13 at Brown. The victory gave the Crimson a season sweep over the Bears and was the team’s fifth in a row.
Down three at the half, Yale outscored Dartmouth 28-17 in the third quarter to lead the Bulldogs to a 13-point win. While Yale’s season sweep of the Big Green and weekend split keeps it in the hunt for a slot in the Ivy Tournament, Dartmouth’s 14th straight loss keeps them winless in Ivy action and eliminates it from postseason play.
Like last February, the Lions and Tigers faced off in front of a boisterous capacity crowd at Levien Gymnasium with first place on the line. And just like a year ago, Princeton controlled the game from the very beginning, quickly taking the students out of the contest and running away with a commanding 18-point victory.
The Tigers’ eighth win in a row was the first their first taste of Ivy revenge in the Carla Berube era, rebounding from an 58-55 defeat at home in early January.
With nine league games in the book, Princeton, Columbia and Harvard sit atop the standings, while Penn is one game back in fourth and Yale is two games behind.
While the preseason favorite Tigers and Lions split their season series, the commanding nature of Princeton’s road win, the reemergence of the team’s offense and the presence of the Ivy League Tournament at Jadwin Gymnasium seems to put the Orange & Black in the driver’s seat for the league’s automatic bid.