Home of the Roundball Poets
It doesn’t take a deep dive into the recent history of Dartmouth men’s basketball to see that finding positive material can be quite difficult, most prominently not having been to the NCAA Tournament since 1959, the longest active drought for any team that has actually appeared in the Big Dance.
So here is an incomplete list of accomplishments the Big Green has already gotten to after holding off Florida Gulf Coast 55-49 on an icy night in Hanover to move to 2-0 on the young 2019-20 season:
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:
Dartmouth senior guard Brendan Barry is out for the 2019-20 season due to injury, according to Dartmouth Athletics.
Barry’s plans following this season have not been determined and a decision about his future won’t be made until well after the season, per Dartmouth Athletics.
Barry has been a major focal point of Dartmouth’s offense the past two seasons, ranking second on the team and 11th in the Ivy League last season at 13.2 points per game. He also was a pivotal ball distributor for the Big Green, boasting the conference’s highest assist-to-turnover ratio for the second straight season as a junior.
But Barry is perhaps most well-known for his three-point shooting and has posted one of the top two highest three-point percentages across the league in all three of his seasons at Dartmouth, shooting 44.5% for his career.
Barry also led the Ivy League last season in minutes played after finishing second in that category as a sophomore, underscoring how significant of a loss Barry’s sidelining for the 2019-20 season will be.
On Wednesday morning, coach Dave McLaughlin released the schedule for Dartmouth men’s basketball. The Big Green’s 14 Division I nonconference games, heavy on regional opponents and light on highly ranked rivals, will be highlighted by trips to Tampa to take on the defending College Basketball Invitational champion and Lowell for the inaugural River Hawk Invitational.
The Green have only five non-Ivy games at Leede Arena, but they will get to see neighboring Vermont, which is the three-time defending America East regular season champion and ranked in the Top-100 heading into this season. The team will hit the road for 10 games before league play, including the Nov. 8 opener at defending MAC champion Buffalo, which went 32-4 last year and made it to the second round of the NCAA Tournament.
Courtney Banghart took over as head coach at Princeton in 2007 aged just 29 with only four years as an assistant coach at her alma mater Dartmouth.
She leaves Princeton with 254 career victories and seven Ivy League championships, leading Princeton to its first ever NCAA Tournament appearance and then seven more en route to notching more than 36% of the program’s wins in its 48-year history herself.
North Carolina named Banghart its head coach Tuesday, seeing her as the key to a refreshing program restart after the messy exit of predecessor Sylvia Hatchell, who resigned earlier this month after 33 years at the helm in Chapel Hill, including a national championship in 1994, following an independent investigation finding that she made racially insensitive remarks to her players and pressured some to play through injury.
In its announcement of the Banghart hire, North Carolina Athletics led off by touting Banghart’s leadership credentials.
Eight thoughts on the Ivy men’s basketball, which, per KenPom, gave us the highest percentage of games decided by three or fewer points or in overtime in all of Division I for the second straight season:
Crimson are No. 1 for a reason
Harvard conquered its house of horrors, Levien Gym, 83-81, after an obligatory overtime period to claim its seventh Ivy League championship under Tommy Amaker and the No. 1 seed in the Ivy League Tournament. But is Harvard a vulnerable No. 1 seed?
In Saturday’s regular season finale against last-place Dartmouth, Cornell’s five seniors Joel Davis, Jack Gordon, Troy Whiteside, Steven Julian, and of course Matt Morgan were honored pregame and all got the start. After Cornell got the first two points just 35 seconds in from a Steven Julian alley-oop, the Big Green went on an 11-2 run and eventually led by one at the half.
But Cornell dominated the second half, outscoring Dartmouth by 16 and winning, 66-51. Jimmy Boeheim arguably played his best game of the season, finishing with 21 points off an excellent 9-for-10 shooting from the field, and a perfect 2-for-2 from deep.
Matt Morgan couldn’t follow up his dominant 31-point performance on Friday against Harvard, finishing with just eight points and snapping his double-digit scoring streak at 80 games, good for 12th in college basketball history and an Ivy League record.
Seeing it through
Brown notched an outstanding 67-63 win at Jadwin Gym, hanging on after nearly surrendering a 60-47 lead with 2:17 left. Brandon Anderson was the best player on the floor off the bench, posting 21 points and three steals in just 28 minutes, his trips to the foul line and jumpers setting back the Tigers any time they got even a modicum of momentum. Brown’s defense shut Princeton down early and often, holding the Tigers to 0.79 points per possession and collecting a whopping 25 turnovers from the hosts.
A little more than two weeks ago at the halfway point, Cornell had a 5-2 Ivy League record and looked well in control of the fourth seed for the Ivy League Tournament. But after a home loss to Yale, and two consecutive road weekends that resulted in being swept, Cornell now sits at 5-7 and tied with Penn for fifth, a game behind Brown.