Home of the Roundball Poets
1. Yale (2-1)
Who outside of New Haven expected Yale to have this kind of start when then-Ivy Player of the Year candidate Makai Mason was declared out for this season with a foot injury?
And who expected Yale to gel so quickly after Ivy Rookie of the Year candidate Jordan Bruner reportedly suffered an ACL sprain earlier this month?
Last year, the Elis won their first outright Ivy title since 1962 and their first NCAA Tournament game ever. They narrowly lost to Duke in the round of 32 in Providence. This year’s version will present more of a challenge to heralded head coach, James Jones, who enters his 18th year as Elis coach and the dean of all Ivy coaches. Jones won the coveted mid-major Coach of the Year honor last year, along with a host of other honors.
Justin Sears, 2016 Yale graduate and two-time Ivy Player of the Year, was named to Great Britain’s preliminary roster for this summer’s EuroBasket 2017 Qualification Games, according to British Basketball.
Sears is one of 24 players named to the preliminary roster, from which 16 will attend training camp next month.
Sears signed a professional contract with Germany’s Giessen 46ers in June after having helped lead Yale to its first NCAA Tournament appearance since 1962 in March.
British Basketball players and coaches will convene at a training camp in Portugal in early August.
Sears’ former teammate, junior Makai Mason, is currently training with the German National team, as is Columbia 2016 graduate Maodo Lo.
Our Richard Kent caught up with Yale junior guard and March Madness standout Makai Mason and talked to him about what Yale fans can expect from next year’s Bulldogs team as the program defends its 2015-16 Ivy championship and much more:
It would be easy to point back to last season’s heartbreaking collapse and say that this year’s title run started simmering from the moment Javier Duren’s runner rimmed out at the Palestra on March 14, 2015. Certainly, that would be a convenient starting point for this narrative of redemption that culminated in this year’s seeding upset of the Baylor Bears. But anyone who’s been following the Bulldogs knows that this journey towards a title to call our own started long before that.
How did we get here?
There have been countless close calls since James Jones took the reins back at the turn of the century: the three-way tiebreaker in ’02 with Penn and Princeton, the thrilling up-tempo ’07 squad led by Eric Flato and Casey Hughes that started 9-2, beating undefeated Penn and sparking the only (non-Princeton) court storming I’ve ever witnessed at John J. Lee, the dangerous Greg Mangano-Reggie Willhite-Austin Morgan trio that raced out to fast start in ’12. But it wasn’t until Justin Sears arrived in New Haven that following summer that Jones could finally build around a true superstar in blue. And while getting to the Promised Land required contributions from everyone on this year’s squad from Blake Reynolds to Khaliq Ghani to Makai Mason, this was clearly Sears’ team.
But first, let’s go back to where it all began, back to a time when Yale basketball conjured up images of January hope and February despair, not the March ecstasy that we’ve come to know.
So very close.
No. 12 Yale came up just short in its bid for the first Sweet 16 appearance in program history, falling to No. 4 Duke, 71-64, in front of a pro-Yale partisan crowd at the Dunkin’ Donuts Center in Providence.
With the exception of a few high-profile bloviators, most people around college basketball (and everyone that regularly reads this blog, for that matter) knew that Yale had a solid shot against Baylor on Thursday.
We all know that the Bulldogs delivered — and have about as favorable a matchup as they could possibly get in the round of 32, getting a Duke team they’ve already faced.
Having had the opportunity to watch both teams play in the round of 64 on Thursday in Providence, I’ve come up with a bit of a game plan for Yale to become the first Ivy team to reach the Sweet Sixteen since Cornell made its magical run in 2010.
Yale lost to Duke in November, 80-61, with the Blue Devils shooting 48.3 percent from the floor, including 58.3 percent from two-point range. Duke scored 1.19 points per possession against the Bulldogs, with four Dukies scoring at least 12 points. Indeed, Duke’s offense is its calling card, as coach Mike Krzyzewski’s squad ranks fourth in the nation in adjusted offensive efficiency and fifth in offensive turnover percentage. Duke is also 26th nationally in three-point percentage. The Dukies’ offense is disciplined, efficient and potent from long range.
But the Elis match up well with the Blue Devils in three key areas and will defeat Duke if it can capitalize on them:
Yale made history just by showing up. Then the Bulldogs made a whole lot more.
In Yale’s first NCAA Tournament game since 1962, the Bulldogs won their first contest in the tourney ever, besting the Bears, 79-75, after leading most of the way in front of a Yale partisan crowd at the Dunkin’ Donuts Center in Providence.