Men's Basketball: Princeton earns season's first win at Army

Freshman guard Doug Davis led the team in scoring for the third game in a row with 19 points. Princeton (1-2 overall) was keyed by its strong play in the second half, outscoring Army (1-3) 30-17 after the break.

“We didn’t really realize [we’d ended the losing streak] until a couple of minutes after the game,” junior guard and co-captain Nick Lake said. “It was a big one for us.”

While the final score definitely represented a blowout, the game was close in the first half. Princeton took an early 6-3 lead, but Army scored five straight points to make it 8-6. The Tigers did not give up, retaking the lead with a four-point run, but Army tied the game at 10 with 13 minutes, 34 seconds remaining. The lead continued to change hands throughout the half, with Army at one point holding a 25-21 lead. The Black Knights held a slim 26-25 lead at halftime, but Princeton came out strong and never looked back in the second 20 minutes.

“The main [key to the win] was that … for 40 minutes, we played solid defense,” Lake said. “That’s how we were able to put them away.”

Coming out of the locker room to start the second half, the Tigers refocused, and it paid off big time. They went on a 17-4 run at the beginning of the half and never led by fewer than nine points for the rest of the game. Princeton led by as many as 16 as it coasted to the win.

“It felt good to get a win,” Lake said.

Aside from the end of the 24-road-game losing streak on the road, the biggest story of the game was the performance of phenom Doug Davis. In netting 58 points on the season — more than double that of the team’s second-best player — the guard has not scored fewer than 14 points in any of his three games this season. This works out to a sizzling average of 19.3 points per game, the fourth best in the Ivy League and only 3.4 points per game behind league leader Alex Barnett of Dartmouth.

“[Davis] is awesome,” Lake said. “He steps up and makes shots; he’s fearless.”

The Tigers now look forward to Wednesday’s battle with Fordham, where they will try to make it two in a row on the road. The Rams have dropped three straight to open their season, with the first of those losses coming against the Tigers’ Ivy League rival Columbia. Fordham does, however, have a win in a preseason exhibition game.

Princeton hopes to build on Sunday’s defensive play tomorrow as it attempts to get back to .500. The Rams are led by senior forward Chris Bethel, who had his first career double-double in Fordham’s loss to Manhattan.

This early in the season, as the Tigers try to rebound from last year’s dismal 6-23 record, they can take little solace in that they could have easily won their first two games. The team said it believes that this year’s squad really has faith in head coach Sydney Johnson ’97, however, and it expects good things come league play.

“We’ve got a lot of positive things going for us,” Lake said. “Every guy on the team has really bought in, which is awesome.”