Johnson ’97’s first season tough

Princeton finished 6-23 overall for the worst record in school history, including a last-place, 3-11 mark in the Ivy League.

The Tigers jumped out to a 2-0 start to their season, picking up home wins over Central Connecticut State and Iona that had Princeton looking like it was ready to turn the page. The sophomore duo of center Zach Finley and guard Lincoln Gunn took turns showing off their potential as go-to scorers, with Finley notching a career-high 22 points in a 59-57 win over the Blue Devils in the season opener, and Gunn pouring in 20 as the Tigers dismissed the Gaels, 66-58.

The lights began to dim on Princeton’s season, however, when the team travelled to sunny Hawaii and dropped three straight games at the Maui Invitational. Double-digit defeats at the hands of Duke and Arizona State were followed by an embarrassing 74-70 loss to Division II Chaminade, the tournament host.

The trio of trip-ups was the beginning of a 12-game losing streak for Princeton stretching from mid-November into January. Among the worst defeats during the slump were a 53-32 loss to Evansville during which the Tigers had five times as many turnovers (15) as assists (three) and a 71-66 home loss to Manhattan in which Princeton blew a 13-point second-half lead.

“It is frustrating losing all these games and seeing ourselves put out effort,” senior forward and co-captain Kyle Koncz said after a 76-71 loss to Lafayette on Jan. 9. “It happened once, it happened twice. At some point we have to learn — we have to learn how to win a game, because we’re going to be in games like this come February and March.”

While the Tigers finished the season 0-13 on the road, a stretch of three home games in late January and early February temporarily revitalized Princeton. A 60-46 tune-up victory over Division II Dominican got the Tigers back on the winning track, and they seized that momentum by sweeping the first weekend of their Ivy League season.

Gunn played hero again in Princeton’s triumphant weekend, scoring 17 points each in a 57-53 win over Dartmouth and a 68-54 defeat of Harvard. The star of the game against the Crimson, however, was Koncz, who posted 21 of his career-high 24 points in the first half, furthering a personal legacy of success against Harvard, against whom he scored 20 or more points thrice in his career.

The wins over the Big Green and Crimson proved to be little more than fool’s gold, however, as Dartmouth and Harvard finished in a three-way tie with Princeton for last place in the Ivy League. The Tigers could not find the same succcess against the rest of the conference, dropping their next nine Ivy games. Princeton played extremely competitively in virtually every one of its league losses, with very few of the games decided until the final minutes. The Tigers’ worst loss of the Ivy season was by just 13 points, and Princeton twice kept things close against Ivy champion Cornell, which went on to complete a perfect 14-0 conference season.

The two most demoralizing of the Tigers’ losses were back-to-back overtime defeats against Brown and Harvard in mid-February. The 65-63 loss to the Bears saw senior forward and co-captain Noah Savage pour in a career-high, Ivy League season-best 35 points in the losing effort while the Crimson loss saw Princeton cough up a 12-point second-half lead despite 22 points from Savage. Savage earned second-team All-Ivy honors for his stellar performance during conference play, when he averaged almost 13 points per game on 40 percent three-point shooting.

The Tigers finally picked up their third and final Ivy win on March 7 in a 75-64 home victory over Columbia. Senior forward Zach Woolridge emerged as the most unlikely of heroes against the Lions, exploding for 15 points after posting just five total points in his 11 previous career appearances at Princeton.

Woolridge, Savage and Koncz were joined by their fellow seniors — guards Kevin Steuerer and Matt Sargeant — in the starting lineup for the Tigers’ final game of the season, a 60-47 Senior Night loss to Penn. While the result was painfully familiar for the quintet of four-year letter-winners, the losses were not as detrimiental to their experience as Princeton student-athletes as many might expect.

“It’s always going to be frustrating to look back on my career and see how many times we lost,” Koncz said after the Penn game, “but there are things you’ve got to take, and I’m a better man because of it.”