The Rahooligan: M. Hoops' Performance Pleases Packed House

Until he does it again, Harvard forward Sam Winter’s monster slam against Brown Friday night should be known as “The Dunk.”

With just under 40 seconds remaining in the second half, Brown’s G.J. King missed a crucial pair of free throws that could have brought the Bears to within six points. Instead, the Crimson pushed the ball quickly upcourt to junior point guard Elliott Prasse-Freeman, who never met an assist he didn’t like. Prasse-Freeman saw that Winter had slipped behind the defense and threw a quick flash pass.

Half a second later, Winter was stuffing the ball in the face of a few Brown defenders, getting fouled in the process and putting the Crimson up 85-75. But it’s what happened immediately after that gives a new meaning to the term “Slammin’ Sammy.”

Winter, not known as a guy who wears his emotion on his sleeves (after all, he’s from Kansas), hopped over to the sidelines, where it seemed like the entire student cheering section was waiting to slap him five. He obliged.

“The atmosphere was great tonight,” Winter said. “Great energy out there.”

Which is an understatement. Lavietes Pavilion was packed for the third straight game, and it wasn’t even Penn-Princeton weekend. The fact that the game was being televised by DirecTV might have had something to do with it; then again, the stands were full for Yale the next night as well.

Despite a second-half meltdown against the Elis where Harvard’s 16-point halftime lead quickly evaporated, the Crimson gave the fans plenty to cheer about. Firstly, except for the second half Saturday night the team was making its shots. Dating back to the Penn game in early January, Harvard was shooting over 50 percent. Timely buckets, and junior guard Pat Harvey’s propensity for finishing off drives in spectacular, Allen Iverson-like manner got the fans on their feet every time.

Big defensive plays incited the crowd as well. The league’s leading scorer, Brown’s Earl Hunt, was jeered by the student fans all night, and it looked like it got to him: he only made one shot and had six points the entire game. A bone-headed play late in the game embarrassed him even more, when Harvard captain Drew Gellert, who covered Hunt most of the evening, simply ripped the ball out of his hands for a steal.

“I think he was going to make a move,” Gellert said. “He just put the ball out in front of him and I grabbed it.”

That’s Gellert being diplomatic. From the sideline, it looked like Hunt was so spaced out he didn’t even realize there was someone there guarding him.

The excitement of Friday’s win over one of the best teams in the conference carried over to Saturday night’s game, and for the first half it looked like the Crimson was unstoppable. A balanced scoring attack by Harvard and the early elimination of Yale’s three-point shooting abilities allowed the home team to go in to the locker room up 38-22.

But then the 20-day layoff between games due to exam period manifested itself in the worst way possible.

Yale’s head coach, James Jones, pulled out a zone defense similar to the one Harvard had used earlier and put the ball in the hands of his two freshmen guards, Edwin Draughan and Alex Gamboa. The zone befuddled a Crimson offense that tried to dribble into it or shoot over it, to no avail.

Harvard shot 30.8 percent in the second half and got stuck with its second straight home loss to Yale.

“Coach had every right to go off on us,” said Harvey, talking about the post-game meeting in the locker room. “We want to bounce back, not let a loss like this ruin our whole season. We can’t get down on ourselves now.”

Harvey’s words ring especially important considering what happened last year, when the Crimson let a close loss at home to Princeton on a Saturday night turn into a five-game losing streak that killed any Ivy title hopes. Just like last year, Harvard now heads into a four-game road jaunt, where the basketball gods have been cruel in the past.

There’s little reason to think the season is in dire straits, but the killer of the Ivy League schedule is that it makes Saturday losses feel like you lost the entire weekend. And with no post-season conference tournament, each home loss adds drama to the race for No. 1.

But the truth is Harvard walks away with a 4-2 Ivy record, good for third in the league. And for only the first time this season (and hopefully the last), the team did not bounce back from the adversity of a close game.

More importantly, so far this season, Dartmouth, Penn, Princeton, Brown and Yale have learned an important lesson: that Lavietes Pavilion is going to be as hard a place to win a game as Penn’s Palestra or Princeton’s Jadwin Gymnasium.

Harvard Coach Frank Sullivan gets the final words here, spoken after the Brown victory but just as appropriate after Saturday:

“We’ve come off three games in a row now, and for people to say that school spirit doesn’t exist—well I think we’ve shown tremendous school spirit. The student fans have been terrific, the cheerleaders, the dance team, the band—I think everybody has been great about this whole thing. It’s truly invigorated the players.”

Need more proof? Just ask “Slammin’ Sammy” Winter and the 2,000 fans who witnessed “The Dunk.”