Carla Berube’s minions continue to amaze.
The Yale Bulldogs arrived at Jadwin Gym Saturday hoping to stop what has become a runaway freight train of a basketball team.
No dice.
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Carla Berube’s minions continue to amaze.
The Yale Bulldogs arrived at Jadwin Gym Saturday hoping to stop what has become a runaway freight train of a basketball team.
No dice.
Both Tiger squads punched tickets to the Ivy League tournament on Friday evening with blowout wins against the Brown Bears. Carla Berube’s women’s team, encountering a surprisingly spunky Bears quintet still smarting from a thorough pasting in Providence last month, was shocked in the first quarter, sharing the lead at 14 points apiece after 10 minutes. No Ivy team had such a start against the Tigers this season.
The weekend’s basketball produced no interesting storylines for either the women or men’s teams at Princeton.
What promised to be a chaotic weekend for the Tigers got off to a troubling start when the head coach had to leave the team after a failed COVID-19 test.
The much anticipated collision between the last Ivy unbeatens, Princeton and Columbia, was far from the expected titanic struggle.
Brian Earl’s Cornell Big Red got sweet revenge Friday for the buzzer-beater loss suffered at Jadwin Gym a month ago.
As the calendar moves into February, we have reached the midpoint of the Ivy season. While this weekend brings the first back-to-back games of the season, Saturday night looks to be the more pivotal evening for the women’s division. Each game pits teams from the four tiers of the conference against one another.
The second meeting between the Tigers and the Big Red was a bigger blowout than the first. On Jan. 8, the Berube Brigade rolled over the Big Red in Ithaca, 65-41. This evening’s rematch at Jadwin Gym was a defensive tour de force for the Tigers as they held Cornell to 9.25 points per quarter while scoring 18.75 themselves.
As we near the halfway mark of the 2022 Ivy League season, here are five thoughts about the state of the race for the men’s league title:
Preseason Ivy favorite Yale returned to one of its comfortable road venues, Jadwin Gym, to upset the Tigers, 80-74. The Tigers have shown a propensity to dig themselves into early holes. This time the hole was too deep, the Eli sharpshooters too deadly. Yale’s 17-point lead at the half, boosted by the Tigers’ surrendering an inexcusable 1-on-2 layup after holding for the last shot, proved to be insurmountable.
In the second half, the Tigers played much closer to their preferred game, making nine of 12 from deep to get back into contention, at one point closing within two. Even when Azar Swain and Jalen Gabbidon were rested in the middle of the second half, the Tigers failed to take advantage. Yale actually added to its lead.
Jaelin Llewellyn dismissed injury concerns to fuel the Tigers’ comeback effort, canning six of 12 shots from deep and scoring 23 points. Ethan Wright and Drew Friberg went a combined 3-for-14 from beyond the arc, with most of those misses coming in the first half.