Men's basketball 'retools' to challenge for Ivy title

Men's basketball got a monkey wrench thrown into its gears Tuesday night at the Palestra, and it will get almost no time to send in the technicians before this weekend's vital Ivy League battles.

This weekend in Jadwin Gym, men's basketball will try to bounce back from their loss to Penn in an electric game at the Palestra. Princeton (10-7 overall, 4-1 Ivy League) will be playing its toughest home weekend of the year, starting with Brown (11-9, 6-0) on Friday night. The Bears are the only team besides Penn that is still undefeated in Ivy League play. On Saturday, Princeton will take on Yale (10-9, 4-2).

If the Tigers can pull out a win against the Bears, their hopes are still alive for winning the Ivy League title and earning the automatic berth into the NCAA tournament that goes along with it.

In order to contend with Brown, the onus will be on Princeton to check the Bears' explosive scoring on offense — the highest among the Ivies at 77.7 points per game. The Tigers may very well be up to the challenge with their ball control brand of hoops that usually keeps the opponent from getting enough opportunities to score many points.

This leaves Princeton with the task of keeping the Bears off the offensive glass in order to reduce any extra scoring chances. The Tigers have not been able to do this most of the season, as they are last in the Ivy League in defensive rebounds.

Brown, however, is the second worst team in the league at obtaining offensive rebounds, though this is probably because they don't miss many shots, with a field goal percentage of 43.9 in Ivy play. The Tigers may be able to counteract this with their consistent defense that has yielded the lowest field goal percentage in the league. They had better be careful not to foul the Bears, since Brown converts on 79.1 percent of their free throw attempts.

The most important cog in the Princeton machine is junior forward Spencer Gloger. He grabs the most rebounds, takes the most shots, and scores the most points — 12.4 points per game — since the Ivy League season began, good for sixth in the league. However, his opponents on Friday have three players above him in that category.

Of course, squeezing a win out of Brown means nothing if they can not repeat the performance the following night against one of the last season's tri-champions — along with Princeton and Penn — Yale.

Yale's two league losses may make them look vulnerable to the Tigers, but both of them came to undefeated Brown. All four of the Elis' Ivy wins came against the four teams that Princeton beat.

If Princeton is hoping to have a night off after dealing with the potent Brown offense, they will be disappointed, since Yale boasts the league's highest field goal percentage as well as the second highest scoring average, behind only Brown.

In order to combat the scoring offenses that come to Jadwin this weekend, Princeton will need to take advantage of every chance they get to put the ball in the hole.

"We are a good shooting team," head coach John Thompson said. "You work the ball around and get open shots; we have guys that can make it, and it has to go in for us to win."

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Unfortunately for Thompson, some of those shots have not been going in. Witness his team's last game, which saw the Tigers shooting only 34 percent from the field, well below their season average of 46.8 percent.

This may be the deciding factor in a game of two relatively evenly matched teams. Yale has not only been able to score early and often, but they have been able to keep other teams from scoring as well.

Though Yale's scoring defense is not quite as strong as Princeton's, the Tigers have the added advantage of their slow play to pad that statistic. Yale scores a lot, and still provides tolerable scoring defense because of its ability to affect the other team's shots. Thompson will be trying to grease his team's machinery this weekend to avoid missing the NCAA tournament for the second year in a row. Winning this weekend is pivotal as Harvard has weakened after losing its leading scorer, Patrick Harvey, for the season after he became academically ineligible.