Harvard Travels For Round Two

It wasn’t pretty. And it definitely wasn’t easy. But with its 76-74 win over Dartmouth last weekend at Lavietes Pavilion, the Harvard men’s basketball team fulfilled the only maxim that matters to any Ivy League team:

Survive and advance.

As the only league in Division I without a year-end conference tournament to determine the recipient of its automatic bid, a team’s entire season boils down to a hellish two-month span that has become known as the 14-game tournament. One bad weekend, and the rest of a squad’s season can be relegated to an afterthought.

Round One of the tournament was good to the Crimson, but Round Two awaits, as Harvard visits the Big Green tomorrow night at Leede Arena in Hanover, N.H.

Surviving the Dartmouth home-and-home Ivy openers has been a skill that the Crimson has mastered in recent history—the Crimson has swept the Big Green in four out of the last five seasons and has taken 10 of the last 11 meetings between the two schools.

While Harvard has been dominant in the win-loss column over the past six seasons, its edge on the scoreboard hasn’t been quite as pronounced, with six of those 11 contests being decided by five points or less.

After last weekend’s nailbiter at Lavietes, there’s plenty of reason to believe that tomorrow’s matchup will be just as hotly contested as those other six.

“I expect it will be more of the same,” said Harvard coach Frank Sullivan after last Sunday’s contest. “It will be a one or two point game.”

That prediction might not have the same appeal as former Dartmouth coach Dave Faucher’s prognostication that “next week will be a freakin’ war” after his Big Green squad defeated Harvard 56-54 in the Ivy opener at Leede Arena last season, but the point remains the same.

The Crimson got a big boost last weekend with the return of sophomore center Brian Cusworth, who had missed four straight games with a left thumb injury. He spent most of the first half shaking off some rust, but he exploded for 13 points after the intermission and finished just one rebound shy of a double-double.

“[For him], it’s like starting the season over again,” Sullivan said after the game.

Cusworth’s return also took some of the pressure off of junior forward Matt Stehle, who responded with a career-high 25 point performance. Stehle added seven rebounds and took home Ivy League Player of the Week honors.

The duo combined to net half of Harvard’s 76 points on the afternoon and pulled down 60 percent of the team’s 26 rebounds.

For the Crimson to be successful against the Big Green tomorrow, Stehle and Cusworth will once again need to shoulder the scoring burden, while the entire team will need to do a much better job on the glass. After outrebounding eight of its first nine opponents this season, Harvard has lost the battle on the boards in each of its last four contests.

The Crimson will also need to slow down Dartmouth guard Mike Lang, who has started just one game this season but leads the team in scoring with 13.2 points per contest. Lang came off the bench to light up Harvard for 24 points in the teams’ first meeting—his second highest output of the season behind a 31-point performance at UC Davis. He earned his first start of the season against Holy Cross on Wednesday and scored 13 points in the Big Green’s 73-52 loss.

Dartmouth’s David Gardner scored a season-high tying 17 points against Harvard last Sunday, but with Cusworth back at full strength for this weekend’s matchup, the Big Green center might find interior conditions much less hospitable.

With just six days between meetings, it’s hard to imagine that either side will be able to change much up, making last weekend’s contest a mere preview of things to come.

“This was a classic Harvard-Dartmouth game,” Sullivan said after Sunday’s win.

There no reason to expect tomorrow’s matchup to be any different.

—Staff writer Michael R. James can be reached at mrjames@fas.harvard.edu.