Women's Basketball Firms Up First-Place Foothold

The Crimson avenged its only league loss of the season with a 68-58 victory over Yale Saturday after dominating Brown, 67-41, on Friday.

Harvard (10-12, 8-1 Ivy) has now passed the halfway point of its Ivy schedule and will play six more regular season games—all against opponents it has already beaten.

With the two victories at Lavietes Pavilion this weekend, the Crimson kept its spot at the top of the Ivy standings, but Dartmouth is nipping at its heels with a 7-2 mark. Harvard will look to ride the momentum from its seven-game winning streak south to Princeton and Penn for two key games this weekend.

Sophomore guard Emily Tay was the offensive leader in the Crimson’s third consecutive weekend sweep, scoring 29 points and 16 assists. Tay’s performance earned her Ivy League Player of the Week honors—the second time in as many weeks that a Crimson player has picked up that award, with sophomore guard Niki Finelli winning it last week.

HARVARD 68, YALE 58

Entering Saturday’s game, Harvard’s only league loss was to Yale, in an away game played shortly after reading period ended. In a heated matchup against the Bulldogs (11-13, 4-6), the Crimson proved that it is worthy of the top spot in the Ivies by asserting its dominance over the previous victors.

Strong defense defined the start of the game, as both teams made a few early stops. Three buckets and an impressive assist by Tay sparked a 10-0 run that gave Harvard a 24-8 lead.

The lead did not stay comfortable for long, though, when Yale’s Jamie Van Horne drained a few three-pointers. She finished the first half with five shots made from downtown and helped Yale cut Harvard’s lead to five by the first buzzer.

Though Van Horne had the hot hand in the first half, Harvard coach Kathy Delaney-Smith thought the Crimson could have done a better job containing a good shooter.

“[Van Horne] is a three-point shooter,” Delaney-Smith said. “The [scouting report] was to not let her have open threes, so that was just a mental breakdown.”

Yale’s long-range shooters cooled down in the second half, but with six minutes remaining, Harvard’s lead was still only five. But in the next couple of minutes, a steal and layup by junior guard Lindsay Hallion, paired with a Finelli three-pointer, pushed Harvard’s lead back up to 12 with 4:40 to play.

Hallion finished the game shooting 70 percent from the field and ended up with 17 points—13 coming in the second half.

“I think defense and rebounding really sparked that run,” Hallion said.

Harvard out-rebounded Yale, 32-23, in the game and also forced five more turnovers. A number of those Bulldog miscues led to key fast-break layups in the second half, and 26 of Harvard’s points came off turnovers.

The Crimson had 38 points in the paint to Yale’s 16, shooting 55.4 percent from the field.

Even though there were not many lead changes in the game, the physical nature of the game—each team saw a player foul out—showed the tension of the rivalry.

Tay scored 17 points in the game, while Finelli added 14. Sophomore forward Emma Moretzsohn had a game-high four blocks for the Crimson.

HARVARD 67, BROWN 41

The Crimson shook off a slew of turnovers early in the game to coast to a 67-41 rout of Brown (4-20, 2-8) Friday night.

Tay and Christiana Lackner led Harvard with 12 points apiece. Tay added eight assists, three rebounds, and three steals to fill out her box score.

Seventeen first-half turnovers tell the story of the Crimson’s early troubles, as Harvard had trouble with the Bears’ defensive pressure in both the full and half-court sets. The team cleaned up its act in the second half, though, recording just one turnover after the break.

“We hadn’t really seen a consistent press, so we were playing conservatively against it,” Delaney-Smith said. “We were trying too hard. But once we made our adjustments, we were fine.”

Defense and free-throw shooting won the day for Harvard, a team that frequently receives outstanding offensive performances but has evolved of late into a more-defensively minded team. The Crimson held Brown to just 26 percent shooting from the floor and made up for its own offensive sluggishness in the first half by hitting 16-of-16 from the free-throw line.

And on a night when no single player was dominant, the win was instead comprised of significant contributions from several members of the team.

“I was telling the girls that I don’t know what the strategy is to prepare for us,” Delaney-Smith said. “We don’t rely on any one person, and I want us to be confident in that aspect of our team.”

This win turned out to be a complete team effort, as each of the team’s twelve players saw significant action.

In particular, the efforts of junior Dimma Kalu and freshman Liz Altmaier seemed to draw particular excitement from the Crimson bench. One highlight in a relatively dull second half came with Kalu’s first collegiate points, as she hit a runner in the lane with 4:05 to go.

“It’s awesome when they can get in,” Tay said. “They work just as hard as everyone else, so it’s exciting for them and for us.”

—Staff writer Emily W. Cunningham can be reached at ecunning@fas.harvard.edu.