Cusworth Steps Up On The Road

When things looked bleak for the Harvard men’s basketball team last Wednesday at New Hampshire, when he was needed most, Brian Cusworth stepped up.

With the Crimson trailing, 70-68, before a hostile crowd and only 4.5 seconds remaining in the game, Cusworth posted up and banked home a 10-foot shot to send the game into overtime.

“Brian’s post-up was as close to the rim as we see him and he did a nice job finishing,” said Harvard head coach Frank Sullivan.

Then, in the extra period, he sealed the Crimson’s 83-81 win by rebounding Wildcats forward Sam Herrick’s intentional free throw miss as time expired.

“We were on the opposite end of a lot of those games last year where we were losing at the buzzer,” said senior captain and shooting guard Jim Goffredo. “This early in the season, to be able to gut a game like that out on the road is big for us.”

The seven-foot Cusworth finished the victory over UNH with a double-double, scoring a team-high 23 points, one short of his season-high, and also leading the team in rebounds with 10. The senior center backed up his strong performance against the Wildcats with another solid outing on Saturday at Colgate.

Cusworth again scored 23 points, tying for the team lead with Goffredo, and pulled down a team-high nine rebounds in a 76-64 victory over the Raiders. At Colgate, the big man scored 17 of his points in the second half, as Harvard overcame a one-point halftime deficit.

His first basket of the second half, coming with 17:52 on the game clock, gave the Crimson a 34-33 lead it would not give up. That basket also started an 8-0 Harvard run; Cusworth added two free throws during the stretch and capped it with a dunk off of his own miss.

For the game, Cusworth shot 9-of-12 from the floor and attempted a game-high nine free throws. Even though he only hit five of them, he helped get the Crimson into the bonus early in the second half and forced Colgate center Marc Daniels to foul out after playing only 13 minutes. Cusworth did a similar job earlier in the week on Wildcats forward Blagoj Janev, who played only 11 minutes before fouling out.

Those two games continued a positive trend for Harvard on the year. The Crimson has attempted and converted more than twice as many free throws as its opponents, hitting 151-of-201 free throws so far, compared to only 73-of-99 for the opposition. Cusworth leads the team in both categories, making 42 of his 59 attempts this season. Against UNH, he shot 9-of-11 from the charity stripe.

So far in his final semester of eligibility, Cusworth is also leading the Crimson is scoring and rebounding, averaging 18.0 points and 8.4 rebounds a game. The rebounding mark tops the Ivy League, while his scoring output is second in the league behind Penn forward Mark Zoller’s 22.9 per game.

Fully healthy this year after missing time in each of the previous three seasons due to injury, Cusworth is among the league leaders in field-goal percentage and blocked shots as well. He is shooting 61.2 percent from the floor on the year, well above his career average of 48.0 percent entering this season, and trails only Zoller on the Ancient Eight leaderboard.

His 1.71 blocks per game are the best in the league.

The consecutive road wins spearheaded by Cusworth marked the first time Harvard has won two straight games away from home since Jan. 28 and Feb. 3, when it toppled Ivy rivals Brown and Columbia.

—Staff writer Ted Kirby can be reached at tjkirby@fas.harvard.edu.