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Ivy League Tournament – at Jadwin Gymnasium (Princeton)
Saturday, March 11: Semifinal at Jadwin Gym
No. 2 Princeton (19-8, 10-4 Ivy) vs No. 3 Penn (17-12, 9-5 Ivy) at 11:00 a.m. (available on ESPNU and ESPN+)
Game #1, 1/16/23: Princeton over Penn (home), 72-60
Game #2, 3/4/23: Princeton (home) over Penn, 77-69 (OT)
Down Go Those Nets! ✂️#MakeShots 🐯🏀 pic.twitter.com/po8escJul4
— Princeton Men’s Basketball (@PrincetonMBB) March 4, 2023
Our George “Toothless Tiger” Clark recaps what Princeton coach Mitch Henderson called the best win he’s ever had, a 76-69 victory over archrival Penn to clinch a second straight Ivy League title and the 29th in program history:
PRINCETON, N.J. — It is hard to envision a more disheartening end to an Ivy League regular season than the collapse Penn orchestrated on Saturday at Jadwin Gymnasium.
The Quakers (17-12, 9-5 Ivy) squandered a 17-point second-half lead before falling in overtime to Princeton (19-8, 10-4), 77-69, handing a share of the Ivy regular season title to their most bitter rivals.
Penn’s undoing was an offensive outage when it mattered most. After sophomore guard George Smith hit a contested layup to extend the Quakers’ edge to 66-58 with 4:16 to go, the team did not make a shot from the field for the remainder of regulation or overtime, a 9:16 stretch.
The Quakers are now locked into the No. 3 seed for next Saturday’s Ivy League Tournament, which will also be held at Jadwin. They will either get a third crack at Princeton or a rubber match against Yale, depending on the result of Yale’s Saturday night road game against Brown.
All the good feelings from Penn’s eight-game winning streak have disappeared in a flash, replaced by a handful of mostly painful Quakeaways:
Despite another stupefying second-half collapse, the Princeton men’s basketball team somehow hung on to defeat the Harvard Crimson at Lavietes Pavilion Saturday, 58-56. With the win, the Tigers retained a share of first place in the conference standings and guaranteed themselves an opportunity to earn at least a share of the Ivy League title with a win on senior night at Jadwin Gym next Saturday against the Penn Quakers in the regular season finale for both teams.
The Tigers gutted out this hugely important road win despite a harrowing stretch of offensive futility that echoed Princeton’s epic second-half collapse against Yale last weekend.
Senior guard Ryan Langborg led the Tigers with 18 points and six rebounds while Evan Nelson led Harvard in scoring with 19 points in a losing cause. Chris Ledlum, playing his final game at Lavietes, was held to 14 points (five below his average), but muscled his way to a game-high 11 rebounds for the Crimson, who were eliminated from Ivy Madness on Senior Night by Princeton for the second year in a row.
Princeton led Yale 61-42 with 8:29 remaining in the game at Jadwin Gym Saturday night. The Bulldogs were missing leading scorer Matt Knowling with an ankle injury suffered the night before.
And yet Princeton could not finish at home to maintain sole possession of first place atop the Ivy League standings. In an instant classic, Yale completed a comeback neither program will soon forget to top the Tigers, 93-83, in overtime.
Yale, Princeton and Penn now share first place in the Ivy at 8-4 in league play.
It had all started so well for the hosts.
The opening games of the second half of the Ivy slate ended with sweeps by Princeton, Yale, Penn and Brown. The Ps did their traditional double wins from home, while the New Englanders were able to earn their victories on the road.
On Friday, the Tigers welcomed Cornell to Jadwin Gymnasium in a match between the league’s top two teams. Prior to the start of the contest, Princeton honored its championship teams from 1996 to 1998, which included Tigers head coach Mitch Henderson and Big Red coach Brian Earl. The Orange & Black overcame a 13-point second half deficit to claim sole possession of first place. The win gave Henderson his 200th career victory.
A day later, the Tigers gave Henderson win number 201 with a comfortable 22-point victory over Columbia, the last-place team in the Ancient Eight.
Yale showed it has completely rebounded from its opening losses to Columbia and Dartmouth by extending its winning streak to five.
The Bulldogs were hot on the offensive side in the first half at Harvard, opening up a 17-point halftime lead. The Crimson tightened the defense in the second half and cut the lead to five with 2:25 to go in regulation, but a 0-for-6 effort the rest of the way ultimately doomed Harvard. With the victory, the Bulldogs completed their second straight season sweep of their Boston rivals.
At Leede Arena, Yale used a 13-0 run to close out the first half and take an 11-point lead into the locker room. The visitors never let the Big Green get closer than 10 and cruised to a 19-point revenge win that gave them sole possession of second place.
Against Columbia on Friday night, Penn took an 18-point advantage at the 13:15 mark of the second half, but the Lions clawed their way back and made it a five-point contest with two minutes on the clock. Similar to Harvard against Yale, Columbia closed the game 1-for-6 and the Quakers came away winning by nine.
Saturday’s matchup between Penn and Cornell was an offensive slugfest with 10 lead changes over the first 30 minutes of action. The Quakers eventually opened up a nine-point lead with 7:19 to go and held on against the never-say-die Big Red. The win, which split the season series, gave Penn its fourth in a row and its 46th all-time sweep of the Empire Ivies.
The Big Red, meanwhile, dropped from the top of the leaderboard to a tie for third after the lost weekend.
In Friday’s game in Hanover, Brown tied a season high with 13-made three-pointers on their way to a season sweep of Dartmouth. Although limited to 24% shooting in the opening half, the Big Green got within seven points with 9:25 left in the contest. The Bears used a 10-2 run over the next four minutes to put the game away.
After four ties and five lead changes in a close contest between Brown and Harvard, Bruno used a 16-zero run to open up a 15-point lead almost halfway through the second half. For the second straight night, the Crimson battled back, eventually making it a two-point game with six seconds remaining. Brown made one of two free throws and the home team couldn’t convert the game-tying three-pointer at the buzzer.
Bruno’s win was the 133rd victory of head coach Mike Martin’s career, tying him for the program lead with Stanley Ward. It also avenged a 70-68 overtime loss to Harvard at the Pizzitola Center on January 6 and put the team in a three-way tie for third place with Cornell and Penn.
By late Saturday night, Dartmouth dropped to sole possession of sixth place, while Harvard, losers of three straight was alone in seventh.
Editor’s note: IHO reporter George “Toothless Tiger” Clark delivers an in-depth audio dispatch on the Princeton men’s and women’s clashes with Cornell while IHO reporter Nathan Solomon gives us the written rundown of the pivotal men’s game in the Ivy title race:
In the second consecutive game without sophomore guard Nazir Williams, the Cornell men capitalized on a hot start to lead by 10 at the half.
But Princeton flipped the switch in the second half, scoring 54 points and connecting on 66% of its shots to fend off the Big Red, 89-82, Friday at Jadwin Gymnasium.
Ivy Hoops Online writer George “Toothless Tiger” Clark reflects on an instant classic in which the Princeton men pulled out a 93-90 overtime victory over Dartmouth at Jadwin Gym Saturday, including clutch plays by Princeton freshmen down the stretch and one of the most impressive performances by a visiting player that our Toothless Tiger has ever seen:
Our George “Toothless Tiger” Clark reports on how the Princeton men pulled away at the Palestra to defeat Penn, 72-60, for a seventh consecutive time:
KINO. LILLY. JUNIOR.@Kino_Lilly FOR THE WIN‼️ pic.twitter.com/DmLDMWFJUG
— Brown Men’s Basketball (@BrownU_MBB) January 14, 2023
Our George “Toothless Tiger” Clark on how a classic unfolded between the Princeton and Brown men at the Pizzitola Sports Center Saturday – setting up the game-winning shot from Kino Lilly Jr. and resulting in the Tigers’ first Ivy loss: