Tripled Threat

Getting single defensive coverage in the low post is what any skilled frontcourt player relishes most.

For captain Matt Stehle, Harvard’s power forward, and senior center Brian Cusworth, those opportunities to go to work on a lone defender with a full assortment of low-post moves have been limited. Since Stehle emerged as the team’s best player in the 2003-04 season and Cusworth returned from injury last year, opposing defenses have continually drawn up schemes to shut down the Crimson’s powerful interior scorers. When the ball gets deep to either of Harvard’s big men, the double team is usually coming along with it, a strategy aimed at forcing the ball away from the Crimson’s top assets.

With the explosion of junior shooting guard Jim Goffredo into the team scoring lead, that strategy might well be revised. Goffredo has torched the Ivy League thus far, putting up 33 points in the opener against Dartmouth and 30 last weekend at Brown, and is now averaging a robust 23.5 points per league contest, 4.5 more than preseason Player of the Year favorite Ibrahim Jaaber of Penn. While there is evidence that the rest of the league was still unsure of the 6’1 guard’s offensive abilities heading into last Saturday, an 8-of-10 performance from downtown against Brown surely dissolved any remaining skepticism.

“Teams are definitely going to start keying on [Goffredo]—I don’t think they’ve really started keying on him yet,” Stehle said. “Teams have been focusing on [Cusworth and I] and leaving it open on the perimeter. The better he plays on the perimeter the easier it is for us inside because they won’t be able to double off of us.

“It’d be great if [Cusworth] and I don’t see double teams,” Stehle added.

Goffredo’s hot hand from the perimeter could lead to many more clear looks at the basket for Stehle and especially Cusworth, who has struggled with his shooting since returning from a hand injury for the start of the Ivy season—just 19-of-46 (41 percent) from the floor in the four league games after shooting 48 percent in the non-conference schedule. Teams who utilize the double team to pester the 7’0 center are now faced with the threat of losing track of Goffredo, who can spot up behind the arc and wait for the pass from inside.

“His scoring during this year has raised eyebrows. I don’t think there are a lot of people that had Jim on the radar screen as a significant scorer [before the season],” coach Frank Sullivan said. “It’s just been such a plus overall to have this versatility, so that if we are confronted with something defensively during the course of the game we’ve got other options. Our team is as versatile a scoring team as we’ve had in awhile.”

One thing the Crimson will likely not be confronted with defensively throughout the remainder of the Ivy slate is the zone defense it saw against Brown. Largely aimed at clogging the interior passing lanes and bogging down post players with help defense, zone defenses are weakest at the perimeters and are vulnerable to the probes of a pure jump shooter, as Goffredo taught the Bears on Saturday.

No other Ivy League team employs the zone as its primary defense besides Brown; the other seven squads use a man-to-man as their base. With Goffredo and the driving ability of freshman point guard Drew Housman keeping those man-to-man defenses from collapsing, Stehle and Cusworth might finally be able to operate around the hoop with the level of freedom they previously could only dream of.

BIG RED MENACE

While Goffredo has proven he can lead Harvard offensively, this weekend he will be looking to show that he can also bear down on defense with the best of the Ivy League.

While the Crimson have developed into a formidable offensive force, the team ranks in the bottom half of the league in scoring defense (66.2 ppg allowed), field goal percentage defense (.442) and three-point field goal percentage defense (.364). That last figure is particularly relevant in regards to the match up on Saturday with Cornell, whose freshman guard Adam Gore is shooting a league-best 46% from behind the arc and leads the Big Red with 13.1 points a game.

Goffredo will likely be given the task of guarding his counterpart Gore, who nearly matched Goffredo’s effort against Brown by scoring 28 in a win over Columbia last Saturday.

“I like the challenge,” Goffredo said. “They’re the best three point shooting team in the league, so stopping their best guy is definitely going to be big.”

POINTS IN THE PAINT

Goffredo also leads the league in free-throw percentage, at .865. Harvard is tops in the circuit with a .732 mark from the line…Stehle is currently sixth in the league in field goal percentage, with a .485 mark…Columbia freshman guard K.J. Matsui, who Harvard will see on Friday night, is second to Gore with a .449 percentage from three. Goffredo is sixth at .389.

—Staff writer Caleb W. Peiffer can be reached at cpeiffer@fas.harvard.edu.