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A wild Saturday capped the regular season for the Ancient Eight. When the dust settled, Yale and Princeton tied for the league title, while Penn settled for third place and Cornell captured the final spot for this weekend’s Ivy League Tournament at Jadwin Gymnasium.
In what was arguably the conference game of the year, it was the worst of times in the opening half and the best of times in the second stanza for the hometown Tigers.
Yale won its fifth Ivy League championship in the last eight seasons Saturday with an 84-75 win at Brown before a sold-out, rowdy crowd of 2,003 at the Pizzitola Sports Center.
“It’s a wonderful feeling,” 24-year Yale coach James Jones said. “To be able to win on the road in a hostile environment shows the character of the guys in our locker room.”
Brown, meanwhile, missed out on an opportunity to punch the program’s first ever Ivy League Tournament ticket with the loss, allowing Cornell to sneak into the tourney.
Yale won’t be making an Ivy League Tournament appearance in coach Dalila Eshe’s first season at the helm after finishing fifth in the conference, but the Bulldogs came through on Senior Day with a 63-53 victory over Brown before many program alumni Saturday at John J. Lee Amphitheater.
The only senior captain for Yale (13-14, 7-7 Ivy), Camilla Emsbo, was honored before the game. Emsbo was injured all season and will compete at Duke next year as a graduate student.
EJ Jarvis, Yale’s 6-foot-8 senior center from Washington, D.C., recently sat down with IHO following a dominant 34-point, 10-rebound outing in a win over Cornell Saturday:
The conference’s next-to-last weekend began on Friday night with a nationally televised game between Princeton and Harvard, two of the four teams headed to the Ivy Tournament. The last time they met in January, the Crimson came away with a 67-59 victory, ending the Tigers’ 42-game Ivy League win streak.
Playing in front of more than 1,700 fans at Jadwin Gymnasium, Harvard took a 14-12 lead after the first quarter. The visitors used a late 13-2 run to open up a 12-point lead before Princeton cut it to 10, 30-20, at the half.
Yale completed its revenge tour of teams against defeated the Bulldogs earlier in the season with a decisive 76-58 win over Cornell at John J. Lee Amphitheater Saturday.
And oh, what a Senior Night it was for senior forward EJ Jarvis.
In a critical game in the fight for an Ivy Madness berth, the Cornell men’s offense never made the trip up to New Haven.
The Big Red scored fewer than 60 points for the second consecutive game, losing 76-58 to Yale for their fifth loss in the last six games
The loss takes Cornell out of the driver’s seat for the final spot in Ivy Madness.
Yale sophomore guard Bez Mbeng leads his team in assists at 4.1 per game and in steals with a total of 36. The 6-foot-4 Potomac, Md. native who coach James Jones told Ivy Hoops Online is the best on-ball defender he’s ever coached. IHO caught up with Mbeng for an interview in advance of Yale’s game against Cornell Saturday night:
Penn is on the verge of a trip to the Ivy League Tournament after pulling off one of its most thrilling victories in years.
The Quakers (15-11, 7-4 Ivy) took down Yale, 66-64, Friday night in a classic Palestra matchup between two teams that have now split their home-and-home series for six consecutive seasons. The two teams exchanged the lead 14 times. Neither led by more than six points.
Penn took the lead for good when sophomore guard George Smith hit an open three at the top of the key off a nice feed from Max Martz to give the Quakers a 52-50 lead with 7:19 to go.
The end was a sequence of events that likely gave Penn fans heart palpitations. The Quakers held a four-point lead with less than 13 seconds to go, but let Bulldogs (17-7, 7-4) guard John Poulakidas hit an open three with about 5.8 seconds on the clock.
Penn got the ball inbounds without issue, but normally reliable free-throw shooter Clark Slajchert split a pair at the line. Despite getting a chance to tie or win the game, Yale could not get off a final shot before the buzzer sounded.
There’s a lot for Penn fans to process ahead of a Saturday night tilt against Brown, such as how …
A key injury spelled doom for Yale at the Palestra in a 66-64 loss to Penn Friday.
With 18 minutes left in the game and the score knotted at 33-33, Yale leading scorer Matt Knowling rolled his ankle. He would not return to the game and his status for tonight against Princeton is questionable.
Penn hung on in a defensive struggle featuring 14 lead changes in which Yale converted just three field goals in the final 5:26. The visitors’ fate was sealed when a fallaway shot landed off base after Yale got the ball back down two with 5.1 seconds left following a 1-for-2 trip to the foul line by Ivy League free-throw percentage leader Clark Slajchert.