League play gets rolling

If the women's basketball team's victory against Penn was any indication, the Ivy League might be a cure for the Tigers, who struggled in non-conference play before taking down the Quakers to begin the league season undefeated. After a seven-game losing streak against a number a tough opponents, Princeton (4-11 overall, 1-0 Ivy League) will head into the heart of its conference schedule after final exams and Intersession.

Princeton's matchup with Dartmouth (4-9, 1-0) on Feb. 1 will be a homecoming for first-year head coach Courtney Banghart, who won two Ivy League championships as a player for Dartmouth and served as an assistant coach for four years in Hanover. This time, though, she will be in the visitor's locker room egging on the players in orange and black against last year's second-place Ivy League team.

Ivy League Player and Rookie of the Week honoree freshman guard-forward Addie Micir will look to continue her stellar play when the Tigers visit Dartmouth. In Princeton's 69-57 victory against Penn, she posted 22 points to notch both honors. Three other Princeton women scored in double figures, including senior captain and forward Meagan Cowher (18), junior guard Jessica Berry (12) and junior forward Whitney Downs (10), but points might be harder to come by against Dartmouth.

Thanks to a tough breed of basketball, the Big Green owns the Ivy League's best defense, allowing just 59.5 points per game. Due to Dartmouth's signature slow, grind-it-out style, the Big Green offense suffers. Dartmouth averages only 49.6 points per game, which is the second worst in the conference.

Banghart has been preaching toughness since the beginning of the season, and Princeton will need to take note if the team wants to come out of Dartmouth with its undefeated record intact.

The Tigers will get little rest after Dartmouth, as they face defending Ivy League champion Harvard (7-8, 0-1) on Feb. 2. While Princeton will have to travel from Dartmouth with less than a 24-hour turnaround, Harvard will be waiting in its own Lavietes Pavilion after a home game against Penn the night before.

Other than Cornell, Harvard had the best non-conference season of the Ivy League teams. The Crimson, however, lost its first Ivy League game, 52-47, to Dartmouth. If the Tigers can hang with the Big Green, it will bode well for their matchup with Harvard.

Both Princeton and Harvard give up 67.1 points per game, which is in the middle of the pack for the Ivy League, so expect more scoring than when the Crimson played Dartmouth. The Crimson also leads the conference in scoring, averaging 65.3 points per game, but if the Tigers can hit threes like they did against Penn — where they shot a season-high 53.3 percent from behind the arc — then they might be able to run right alongside Harvard.

Still, it's going to be a tough job for Princeton to contain its rival. Harvard has won both of the teams' last two meetings by double digits. The Crimson returned four starters from last year, three of whom averaged at least 11 points in 2006-07, so the team that gave the Tigers so much trouble a year ago is still very much intact. Even so, the emergence of Micir to complement the star power of Cowher might be just what Princeton needs to compete with Harvard.

A victory in just one of the weekend's two games might be considered a success, considering that the opponents are last year's top-two Ivy League squads. A pair of upsets against the two tough rivals might be too much to hope for, but rivalry games often lead to unexpected results.