Men's basketball crushes Monmouth in home win

It would be nearly as joyous a celebration as landing on Mars if the men's basketball team were 11-0 right now, after playing two national powerhouses as part of its pre-Ivy League schedule.

Princeton finally played a team within its own galaxy of the basketball universe Wednesday night, when the Tigers (6-5) beat Monmouth (7-4), 67-52.

The game was won early in the second half, when the Tigers started hitting every shot they threw into the atmosphere. After a missed layup at 18 minutes, 20 seconds, Princeton did not miss a field goal for 6:13, scoring 16 points during the stretch to the Hawks' four.

With the score tied at 33, Princeton started the key stretch of the game. The Tigers made five layups and a three-pointer during the run, extending Princeton's lead to a then-game high 10 points. From that point, Princeton's lead never fell below nine points.

The Tigers had let Monmouth hang around in the early going, though. Much of the Tigers' trouble in the first half can be attributed to taking too many three-point shots. They went 4-for-11 in the first half. That may not be bad odds, but it means that Princeton passed up the higher odds of a layup on 11 possessions. In the second half, Princeton took five fewer three-pointers and scored five more points.

Passing up threes and running the offense to find easier layups was a staple of the offense against Oklahoma, when the Tigers took only 10 three-pointers in the game and nearly defeated one of the stellar teams in America.

Senior guard Ed Persia attributed this to a renewed emphasis by the coaching staff before the Oklahoma game: "We had a whole practice, and [head coach John Thompson '88] said, 'You can't shoot a three-point shot this whole practice when we're doing our offense.' It was amazing. For about a 10-minute stretch, we were getting layup after layup, just layups that we hadn't been getting in a long long time, he said.

Persia, who scored a team-high 16 points, added that he has personally been making a conscious effort to be more aggressive. It's been working, as Persia has scored 69 points in the team's last four games to become one of the brightest stars in the Princeton constellation.