Home of the Roundball Poets
Yale’s on a roll.
The Bulldogs shut down Brown with authority in a 73-40 rout at the Pizzitola Sports Center Saturday, completing a season sweep of the Bears after having beaten them 79-72 last Friday.
Yale (12-3, 2-0 Ivy) held Brown (6-9, 0-2) to five points in the first quarter and 15-for-57 (26.3%) shooting for the game.
Brandon Anderson returned to the lineup for Brown on Saturday afternoon, but his team-high 19 points weren’t enough as the Bears dropped a 76-56 decision to Navy at the Pizzitola Sports Center.
The first half, a back-and-forth affair with seven lead changes, ended with the Midshipmen on top, 27-26. Both teams struggled from the field, with Navy shooting 29% and Brown (4-3) hitting 37%. The Midshipmen (4-3) found success at getting to the free throw line, getting 13 chances compared to Brown’s three but only converting on six of those opportunities.
On Thursday, Brown coach Mike Martin announced the Bears 2019-2020 schedule. The 13-game nonconference schedule is highlighted by a visit to Cameron Indoor Stadium to visit Duke on Dec. 28. The team will also visit St. John’s, while welcoming in-state rival Rhode Island to the Pizzitola Sports Center for the first time since a 88-85 overtime loss in 2016.
The conference schedule begins at defending champion Yale on Friday, January 17, followed by five straight games at home against Yale, Cornell, Columbia, Dartmouth and Harvard. The Bears then hit the road for six of their last eight, including four in a row against Penn, Princeton, Columbia and Cornell. Bruno welcomes the Tigers on February 28, followed by a senior night contest against the Quakers. The regular season concludes with a match against regular season favorites Harvard and a visit to Leede Arena to take on Dartmouth on March 7.
Mar. 20, 2019: a sparse but committed crowd enters the Pizzitola Sports Center as Brown men’s basketball hosts a playoff game, its first in five years. Hosting the UAB Blazers, the event is part of the College Basketball Invitational, a minor national tournament. The event is meant to mark the end of a historic season for Brown. Though it ended in disappointment, the regular season yielded 19 wins, tied a program record, so the event should be fun and happy.
But the atmosphere is muted because the situation is more complicated than that.
Brown couldn’t extend its historic 2018-19 season with another win at Loyola Marymount, fading quickly in the second half en route to an 81-63 defeat in Los Angeles.
The loss dropped the Bears to 20-12 on the season, after Bruno already set a single-season record for wins and won a postseason tournament game for the first time in school history by topping UAB at the Pizzitola Sports Center Wednesday.
Eighty years after Brown’s appearance in the first ever NCAA Tournament, the Bears won their first postseason tournament game Wednesday night, also setting a program record for wins in a single season.
Brown defeated UAB, 83-78, at the Pizzitola Sports Center in the first round of the CBI, with senior guard and Ivy Defensive Player of the Year Obi Okolie extending his collegiate career at least one more game with a career-high 26 points on the strength of 7-for-14 shooting from three-point range.
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.
Women’s
Brown’s offense is too potent to miss Ivy League Tournament again
If Brown misses the Ivy League Tournament for a second straight season with as much offensive firepower as it has, it’ll really be a shame.
Brown senior guard Shayna Mehta’s career-high 37 points led the way, and the Bears’ elder Mehta has been one of the league’s standout scorers for a long time now, going back to her Ivy Rookie of the Year campaign in 2015-16.
But Mehta wasn’t alone in gouging a strong Yale defense in the Bears’ 86-71 win over the Bulldogs Friday. Seniors Erika Steeves and Taylor Will, who missed Ivy play last season due to injury, and junior Justine Gaziano combined for 43 points on 18-for-34 shooting. The Bears overwhelmed Yale inside and out, topping Yale by double digits at Pizzitola Sports Center while scoring 80-plus points for the second straight season.
Some unexpected contributors carried their teams on their backs this weekend, yielding varied results.
In Harvard’s 66-51 win over Princeton Friday night, the Crimson offense flowed through sophomore guard Christian Juzang, who posted 20 points – 12 more than his career high up to that point – on 6-for-10 shooting alongside four assists. Columbia rookie guard Gabe Stefanini notched a career-high 20 points in just 27 minutes in the Lions’ wild overtime loss at Brown Saturday night, 17 of them coming in the second half or extra period. After scoring just 26 points in the previous five games, Yale freshman guard Azar Swain registered 25 this weekend, his 7-for-12 (58.3 percent) clip from deep lifting an Elis squad that had been hurting from three-point range.