By the end of January, most men’s basketball teams are already well into conference play. Due to the program-wide exam break, however, Princeton's team is different: as of Friday morning, it was one of only two schools that had not played a league game out of 339 conference-affiliated Division 1 teams. When the Brown Bears visited Jadwin Gymnasium that evening, sophomore center Brendan Connolly won the jump ball and senior guard Dan Mavraides walked it across midcourt, officially kicking off the Tigers’ 14-game Ivy League season.
Twenty-five hours later, Mavraides was at the foul line, making his second free throw to end Yale’s comeback hopes. For the fourth time under head coach Sydney Johnson ’97, the Tigers (14-4 overall, 2-0 Ivy League) opened conference play with a sweep.
Princeton started slowly against Brown (7-11, 0-4) in the opener but pulled away in the second half for a 78-60 victory. Against the Bulldogs (9-9, 2-2), the flow was reversed and more emblematic of the Tigers’ season. They held a 12-point lead with less than seven minutes to play, but Yale cut the margin to just one before succumbing, 67-63.
The Tigers did not make a single field goal in the final six and a half minutes, but five free throws — including Mavraides’s clincher — gave Princeton just enough to pull away.
“They made a couple threes against our zone, and made things tight,” Johnson said. “I’ll take the defensive intensity that we had in the last two or three possessions, but we weren’t as good getting there as we wanted to be.”
Princeton led the Bulldogs by 10 at halftime and played remarkably consistent basketball for most of the second period: the margin was never less than nine points or more than 13 until nearly 15 minutes had elapsed. Senior forward Kareem Maddox and junior guard Doug Davis were the only Tigers to score from the floor in the final half, combining for 22 of the hosts’ 27 points.
Yale went through some offensive struggles of its own, but the Bulldogs finally caught fire with time running out. Bulldog guard Porter Braswell answered Davis' three-pointer with one of his own, sparking an 11-1 run for the visitors. Austin Morgan sank his third triple of the game, and an inbounds play freed Reggie Willhite for an easy layup, cutting the deficit to just two points.
Braswell collected a long rebound for a fast break and had a chance to tie, but Mavraides hurried back to contest the layup in transition, forcing a miss. Yale did not make another field goal for the rest of the game. Down one with 29 seconds remaining, Morgan dribbled the ball off his foot and out of bounds while driving, and Maddox blocked a Braswell floater on the next possession.
Three of four free throws clinched the game for the Tigers, who escaped the latest of many second-half collapses this season.
“We’ve been in that position a lot this year,” Johnson said. “We’re playing with the lead a lot, which shows the progress these guys have made as a group, but obviously we need a little more awareness of how to get from the 10-minute mark to the one-minute mark.”
Though it ultimately became a defensive battle, this game was a shootout early. The visitors scored on five of their first six possessions, but Princeton answered when Davis' three-pointer tied the game at 10 after just 153 seconds.
Yale uncharacteristically attacked the boards in the game’s early stages, collecting six of its first 10 misses and turning those extra chances into nine points. The Bulldogs grabbed only four more offensive rebounds for the rest of the game.
Princeton, meanwhile, did not miss. Only nine of the Tigers’ first-half shots were off the mark — including a desperation three-pointer by Mavraides at the buzzer — as they made 64 percent of their field goals, including four of six from beyond the arc.
Sophomore forward Ian Hummer took over late in the period, showing a variety of moves in the paint and scoring 10 of the Tigers’ final 11 points. He finished the game with 12 points and 11 rebounds, making six of 10 attempts from the floor.
“Our team has been really good at taking advantage of things we see, exploiting advantages as much as possible,” Hummer said. “I was getting some great passes from my teammates in the right spots, the shots were falling, and it was nice.”
While Hummer shined on Saturday, it was Maddox who took over the previous night, posting a double-double of his own. The co-captain had 15 points and 14 rebounds, adding three steals and a pair of blocks. Maddox, the Ivy League’s most accurate shooter at 58.8 percent, made 12 of 20 from the floor this weekend en route to 32 points.
Princeton’s offense sputtered early on, as the hosts did not make a field goal until junior forward Patrick Saunders’s three-pointer four minutes in. A step-back jumper from guard Matt Sullivan — who led all scorers with 22 points — and a pair of free throws from forward Andrew McCarthy gave the Bears an eight-point lead at the quarter pole.
The Tigers then unleashed a 24-2 run, taking a double-digit lead they did not relinquish. After a Tucker Halpern jumper, Brown’s only basket in the seven-minute stretch, Maddox answered with a three-point play to put Princeton on top. Triples by Mavraides and Davis extended the lead to 12, and Maddox capped the sequence with a layup for Princeton’s 15th unanswered point.
“Basketball’s a game of runs,” Mavraides said. “We weren’t sound defensively when we first came out, but we finally started getting stops, which leads to us playing faster and running our offense better.”
The hosts opened the second half with nine consecutive points, all but eliminating any suspense. Fifteen Tigers played after intermission.
Princeton’s next foe is Harvard, which is expected to be the Tigers’ main challenger for the Ivy League title this season. The Crimson swept Columbia and Cornell this weekend, pulling away in the second half of each game, improving to 4-0 in conference play. The game tips off at 7 p.m. Friday.
Stat Corner:
- Maddox became the first Tiger since 2005 to record double-doubles in consecutive games, achieving the feat against The College of New Jersey and Brown.
- Mavraides committed eight turnovers against Yale, the most made by a Princeton player this year.
- Davis entered the weekend making just 38 percent of his two-point attempts but went 8-11 on those shots in the two games. He shot 48 percent from inside the arc in his first two seasons.
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