Home of the Roundball Poets
With the season a few weeks away, the Ivy League hosted Women’s Basketball Media Day on Monday, the first of two media availabilities this week. The event was hosted over Zoom for media members and is available on the conference’s YouTube channel.
The preseason media poll was released last Thursday with Princeton earning all 16 first-place votes. Last year’s Ivy Tournament winner and regular season co-champions are the sixth unanimous pick in league history and the first since Penn in 2016-2017.
No. 1 Princeton (21-5, 12-2 Ivy) vs No. 4 Penn (17-10, 9-5 Ivy), Jadwin Gym, 4:30 p.m. (available on ESPN+)
Game #1, 1/16/23: Princeton (home) over Penn, 55-40
Game #2, 3/3/23: Princeton over Penn (home), 71-52
Heading into the last two days of the regular season, Columbia and Princeton were tied for first, while Penn held a one-game lead over Harvard for third place. After the Lions, Tigers and Crimson each grabbed a win, the Ivy League Tournament semifinal matchups of Columbia against Harvard and Princeton versus Penn had been set. What needed to be determined was the seeding of the four teams and the timing of the two matchups.
When the updated NCAA NET rankings were posted on Sunday morning, Princeton’s convincing road victory over upper division Penn combined with Columbia’s narrow escape at home against seventh-place Cornell resulted in the Tigers overcoming an 11-position difference from last week and taking the No. 1 seed away from the Lions.
Editor’s note: Princeton-Penn is always a big deal, and our Toothless Tiger and Palestra Pete combine to recap Saturday night’s P vs. P action in audio and written form below:
It was The Kaitlyn Chen Show, but more than that, it was The Princeton Defense Show at Penn on Friday night, and the Tigers roared back (sorry) from a first-half deficit to beat the Quakers handily, 71-52.
In some respects, the game was meaningless: For weeks we’ve known that the top two women’s teams going into the Ivy League Tournament would be Princeton and Columbia, and that they would face Penn and Harvard in the first-round games. But pride counts, too, and Princeton knew it needed this win to get a share of its fifth straight regular-season title.
On the Penn side, too, the stakes were emotional: This was Senior Night, and Princeton was the only Ivy the graduating Penn players had never beaten. Truth is, they’d never come very close: The 15-point loss in January at Princeton was their closest score. Their best chance probably would have come in the COVID-canceled Ivy tournament of 2020, or more likely the canceled season that followed, when the career of Penn’s last dominant center, Eleah Parker, would have overlapped with that of forward Jordan Obi.
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.
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.