Getting the Ball Through the Hoop

With 12 minutes to play in the second half of the Harvard men's basketball team's 63-39 loss to Princeton at the Jadwin Gym on Friday, the cry went up from the press box to check the NCAA record books. History was being made.

Mark Panus, Princeton's sports information director, dutifully went off and returned a few minutes later with the news:

"Sorry, but the NCAA doesn't keep that stat," he told the disappointed reporters.

The statistic in question? Lowest field goal percentage for a game. If the NCAA kept records of that stat, Harvard would have had a real shot at it (so to speak). At the time, the Crimson was in a 2-for-33 groove from the floor, a streak dating back to the opening tip. The score was 41-13.

The following night, Pennsylvania held Harvard scoreless from the floor for the first 7:03--running up an 11-0 lead before junior Tarik Campbell slashed into the lane and banked home a layup.

The two incidents of Chris Dudley-esque marksmanship highlighted the biggest problem for the Crimson this year: getting the ball to go through the hoop.

Sounds like a bad ESPN analyst, doesn't it? But here, as in life, all the cliches are true.

Harvard is shooting 35.3 percent (148-for-301) on the road and is 0-8 away from the friendly confines of Briggs Cage.

(The problems are not as severe at home, where the Crimson is shooting 187-for-529 for a 49.2 percentage and is 3-2.)

But the low shooting percentage is the symptom, not the malady. The problem is that Harvard is a couple of dimensions short of reality on offense.

Captain Tyler Rullman, the Ivy League's leading scorer at 22.4 points per game, is the only player who can consistently conquer the mysterious rifts in the space-time continuum that surround the Harvard basket these days.

Penn, Princeton and the other five Ivy League teams are not stupid, and they will naturally put their best defender on Rullman. Against Princeton, point guard Mike Brennan held Rullman scoreless from the field for the first 30 minutes of the game.

A more aggressive Rullman looked for his shot more often against Penn, but sophomore Eric Moore performed a Human Velcro stunt and the Winthrop senior didn't score until he canned a three 9:06 into the game--the first trey of the weekend for the second-best three-point bomber in Harvard history.

With Rullman out of the game, the scoring load shifts to point guard Tarik Campbell, the Ancient Eight assists leader at 5.5 per contest. No team has yet matched Campbell's slashing quickness on the perimeter, but it's only a 35 percent bet when Campbell takes shot (25 percent from downtown.)

So Campbell will drive and try to take the layup, but opposing coaches look for this, too, and clamp down on the Leverett junior with a couple of big men.

(An interesting note: both Princeton Coach Pete Carril and Penn Coach Fran Dunphy said after the game, "We had trouble guarding [Campbell] early but we tightened up on him as the game went on.")

That leaves the pass--the dish, which Campbell does better than anybody in the Ivy League. But who can he dish to? Who gets the ball?

Who can break the clamp on Rullman and Campbell?

Tune in tomorrow. Sullivan needs to figure out some solutions--soon.

John B. Trainer is a Crimson staff writer.