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?
Yale starting point guard and star of last season’s historic NCAA tournament run, Makai Mason will miss the entire 2016-17 season with a foot injury.
Mason was injured in a scrimmage this weekend and will need to undergo surgery to repair his foot. It’s unclear at this point whether Mason will withdraw from Yale to preserve the year of eligibility.
The news is a crushing blow to James Jones’ Bulldogs who will kickoff their title defense this coming weekend at Washington.
The injury was first reported by Erik Dobratz of News 8 in New Haven.
If Mason does not withdraw from school this semester, the junior will lose a year of eligibility at the program, per Ivy League rules. If he does withdraw this semester, he can return for fall 2017. If he decides to stay in school, then he would graduate in spring 2018 and have a year of eligibility as a graduate transfer.
What happened last year (23-7, 13-1): Nothing to see here, just the program’s first NCAA Tournament appearance in 54 years and a thrilling NCAA first-round win over Baylor. Now graduated forward Justin Sears picked up a second straight Ivy Player of the Year award and now-junior guard Makai Mason established himself as a potential Ivy Player of the Year in future seasons with his clutch play all year, including a 31-point performance against Baylor.
For a deeper look back at Yale’s banner year, read our Ian Halpern’s comprehensive chronicle from April of the Bulldogs’ rise to championship history.
Columbia’s run to the CIT title, including a semifinal win over NJIT and Jim Engles, felt like catharsis for a class that had seen its fair share of ups and downs.
Now it’s November and the leaders behind that run are gone: Kyle Smith to San Francisco, Maodo Lo and Alex Rosenberg to overseas contracts, Grant Mullins to Cal, and Isaac Cohen to the working world. So if everyone hits their 99th percentile performance in Morningside Heights this season, what can we expect? A group whose most experienced players are bigs and a coach who promises to run at a breakneck pace (at least compared to Kyle Smith’s) is a recipe for either the greatest incarnation of Seven Seconds or Less ever, or at least the most hilarious one. We do not know what Columbia’s lineup will look like. We do not know which freshmen will be able to contribute starting Friday at Stony Brook. What we do know is if everything goes according to plan, Columbia is going to win the Ivy title in the most ridiculous way possible.
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.
Adam Zagoria of SNY.tv reported Friday (and our own Richard Kent confirmed) that Yale junior guard Makai Mason will play with the German national team for the next two months and then in the World Games 2017, joining Columbia 2016 graduate (and fellow All-Ivy first-teamer) Maodo Lo.
Lo has played for the German national team for the past two years and remains an “intriguing prospect from an NBA standpoint” on the Philadelphia 76ers’ Summer League roster per The Sixer Sense.
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.
Pete Thamel of Sports Illustrated reported Monday Yale sophomore guard Makai Mason is declaring for the NBA Draft.
Under new NBA Draft rules, players can see where they are projected to be chosen and subsequently decide to return to school at their discretion.
“We want to take advantage of that new rule, show people beyond the Ivy League what he’s capable of,” Mason’s father Dan told Thamel.
Mason scored a career-high 31 points in No. 12 Yale’s 79–75 upset of No. 5 Baylor in the first round Thursday and went 2-for-12 from the floor in Yale’s 71-64 loss to No. 4 Duke Saturday.