Men's Basketball: Last home weekend will be no easy task

With Cornell needing just one more victory in its final two games to clinch the Ivy League title, the men’s basketball team’s hopes for a league championship are on life support. So what? Some tantalizingly good basketball remains to be played, and all of the remaining games will take place in Jadwin Gymnasium.

Princeton (17-8 overall, 8-3 Ivy League) will host Dartmouth (5-20, 1-10) and Harvard (20-6, 9-3) this weekend, with each game offering its own set of challenges.

The Big Green and the Crimson will visit Jadwin with completely different resumes, but expect the Tigers to come out ready to play regardless of their opponent.

“We just like playing,” head coach Sydney Johnson ’97 said. “We’re just trying to approach them a game at a time.”

Princeton returns home after its final pair of road games. The Tigers dropped another three-point heartbreaker last Friday to Cornell, which has clinched at least a share of the Ivy League championship. But Princeton didn’t dwell on its loss, and it quickly bounced back with a strong effort against Columbia, winning 67-52 over the Lions.

After losing 2009 Ivy League Player of the Year Alex Barnett, Dartmouth has struggled mightily, with its only league victory coming over Columbia. The Tigers now have the opportunity to avenge last year’s late-season loss, when Dartmouth defeated Princeton behind a spectacular performance from Barnett on the night that Carril Court was christened.

The game against the Crimson clearly boasts more star power. Guard Jeremy Lin, a legitimate NBA prospect and a strong candidate for this year’s Ivy League Player of the Year, headlines a streaking Harvard squad. If both the Tigers and the Crimson win on Friday and Cornell loses, whoever takes Saturday’s game could keep its championship hopes alive. Also on the line is second place in the Ivy League.

Early in the season, national media outlets like ESPN were wondering if both the Crimson and the Big Red could earn bids to the NCAA tournament. That talk died down after the Tigers and Cornell dealt Harvard a total of three league losses, but that does not mean the Crimson has not been playing outstanding basketball.

Harvard’s 20 wins this season already rank as the best in program history.

Last time around, the Tigers used a strong defensive effort to run out to a big lead and then hung on for dear life as the Crimson mounted a furious charge. Lin still scored 19 points in Princeton’s 56-53 victory, but he needed 16 shots to get there, which was a testament to the Tigers’ defense — they made him work for every point.

Lin, who has been nominated as a finalist for the Bob Cousy Award — given to the nation’s top point guard — has averaged 16.8 points per game and boasts an outstanding 52.5 shooting percentage from the floor. He also averages 4.3 rebounds per game, and his 67 steals this season leads the league. Last week, he took home Ivy League Player of the Week honors.

In the teams’ last meeting, though, Princeton didn’t have to account for freshman guard Brandyn Curry.

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Curry managed only five points in 20 minutes in that contest, but after his performance this past weekend — which saw Harvard trounce Yale and Brown by 20 points each — Curry will walk onto Carril Court as the Ivy League’s Rookie of the Week. Curry poured in a combined 35 points this past weekend on 71 percent shooting from the floor.

“They have a terrific all-league player in Jeremy Lin,” Johnson said of Harvard. “They’ve added a tremendous core of talented players — freshman and sophomores — to complement Jeremy so well. There’s a balanced attack, a lot of depth and energy, they’re leading the league in scoring. So it’s a team that’s playing very good basketball right now, and I know that we’re going to have a challenge to try and play well against them Saturday.”

While the Harvard game boasts all of the flashy appeal, the matchup against Dartmouth will still be a challenge. Anyone who doubts that assertion need only look back to Princeton’s last home weekend, when Brown out-hustled the Tigers to a 57-54 victory after Princeton had obliterated Yale on ESPNU the evening before.

“Before you can expect to win a game, you have to have a great effort,” Johnson said. “For example, against Yale, we had a tremendous effort, we had a tremendous win. We played Brown the next night, we had a miserable effort, we had a miserable loss.”

“The Princeton-Dartmouth game says a lot about that value of competition,” Johnson added. “There’s always something to play for, and I expect Friday to be a tough game and a physical game.”

Even though the Tigers’ chances at an Ivy League title are flickering at best, they still have an opportunity to better last year’s 8-6 conference record.

The Tigers have steadily improved in the last three years. Though they haven’t ascended to the top of the Ivy League, that remains the ultimate goal. And one way Princeton can take that next step is to continue to rebuild a strong home-court advantage. Success begets success.

“That’s certainly the goal,” Johnson said of re-establishing Princeton as an Ivy League power. “We had close to 6,000 people attend our game against Cornell. I think that’s a clear step forward that people see us as a team that’s worth watching. We want to continue that trend. Hopefully we can play well and kind of keep that going.”

Tonight’s game against Dartmouth will tip at 7 p.m., and the Harvard game is on Saturday at 6 p.m.