Home of the Roundball Poets
With Yale trailing by one, 54-53, in a back-and-forth Ivy League Tournament final battle Sunday, Yale junior guard and Ivy Player of the Year Miye Oni picked up his fourth foul and was promptly benched. Even on its home floor at John J. Lee Amphitheater, the Bulldogs looked like they’d been bit.
But they were about to bite back.
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?
On Wednesday, the Ivy League office announced that Harvard will host the 2020 Ivy League Tournaments on Sat., Mar. 14 and Sun. Mar. 15. In addition, the league also scheduled the tournament locations through the 2024-25 season, with each of the conference’s schools that haven’t already hosted getting a turn.
After holding the first two Ivy tournaments at Penn’s Palestra (seating 8,722) and scheduling this year’s event at Yale’s John J. Lee Amphitheater (2,800), the league has elected to follow a southern-central-northern pattern for future sites. After Harvard’s Lavietes Pavilion (1,636), Ivy Madness will travel down south to Princeton’s Jadwin Gymnasium (6,854) in 2021, followed by trips to Brown’s Pizzitola Sports Center (2,800) in 2022 and Cornell’s Newman Arena (4,473) in 2023. The event will move to the northern-most site at Dartmouth’s Leede Arena (2,100) in 2024, before finishing the rotation at Columbia’s Levien Gymnasium (2,700) in the spring of 2025.
With seven weeks to go before the 2019 Ivy Tournament shootarounds on Fri., Mar. 15 at Yale’s John J. Lee Amphitheater, it’s time to check in on the most recent news surrounding Ivy Madness III.
Ivy Hoops Online: Congrats on the recent tourney win in Boca. How does it feel to take home two trophies in 2018 (after winning the WBI championship in March)?
Allison Guth: Feels excellent to take home the hardware in any tournament … We care about setting our sights to the only tournament that matters right now, and that’s the Ivy Tournament.
Ivy Hoops Online editor Mike Tony is joined by Ivy League Executive Director Robin Harris and IHO writer George Clark for the season premiere of the Inside Ivy Hoops podcast.
Mike and George preview both the men’s and women’s Penn-Princeton tilts to come Saturday, making sense of the two very different trajectories that the Penn and Princeton men are on going into their matchup as well as what has changed and what hasn’t for the Penn and Princeton women, plus why the Penn-Princeton scheduling this season is particularly disappointing:
On Thursday, the Ivy League office announced that it will produce a weekly “Road to Ivy Madness” podcast for the upcoming conference schedule. The 12 episodes, available each Wednesday on IvyLeague.com and Apple Podcasts, begin on Jan. 2, three days before the opening of league play with a Penn-Princeton doubleheader at Jadwin Gym. Each “Road to Ivy Madness,” hosted by Bill Spaulding, is expected to be 20-25 minutes in length and feature major storylines in both the men’s and women’s divisions.