Crimson Staggers Into Last Weekend

Out of the race for the title and that elusive automatic NCAA tournament berth that goes with it, the Harvard men’s basketball team (11-15, 4-8 Ivy) will hit the road this weekend to cap off another year in the middle of the pack of the Ivy League.

Fresh off its 50-43 victory over Princeton last Saturday night, which snapped a five-game losing streak, the sixth-place Crimson will face Cornell (15-11, 8-4 Ivy) in Ithaca, N.Y at 7 p.m. tonight. Tomorrow, Harvard will head to New York City to take on Columbia (14-12, 5-7 Ivy) in its season finale.

The Crimson’s last meeting with Cornell ended successfully, when sophomore forward Evan Harris’ layup with 0.8 seconds remaining gave Harvard a 65-64 win at Lavietes Pavilion on Feb. 3. Last year when the teams met in Ithaca, the Crimson found itself on the other end of a last-second decision, falling 79-77, when the Big Red’s Jason Hartford grabbed a rebound off a three-point miss and put it home for the victory with 2.4 seconds left.

“It was probably one of the most bizarre endings of any game I’ve seen,” Harvard coach Frank Sullivan said of last year’s game at Cornell.

“The players after the game [this season] were saying that the basketball gods paid us back for that one,” Sullivan added. “On that last play, Drew [Housman] actually passed a ball through a guy’s legs [to Harris]. That too was a bizarre sequence.”

Whether last second heroics will decide the outcome again this time around is unclear, but the Big Red will certainly be looking to avenge its loss tonight playing on its home court.

“I think we’ll definitely see their best,” captain Jim Goffredo said. “They’re going to come out firing, but so are we; I think it’s going to be a good game.”

Following tonight’s matchup, the Crimson will head to Columbia to take on the Lions, a team that surprised Harvard at Lavietes Pavilion earlier in the year with deadly three-point shooting and a 90-70 win.

“We just caught them on a night where they were on fire,” Goffredo said, referring to Columbia’s 11-for-13 shooting from three-point land. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen a team shoot like that before.”

Much of Columbia’s three-point shooting success came as a result of inside-outside ball movement, with the Crimson focused on double teaming the post players.

“We were very concerned about [Lions’ forward John] Baumann, very concerned about [center Ben] Nwachukwu,” Sullivan noted. “And I think what we saw in the process were the perimeter guys really carry them during the course of the game, and they got into a great rhythm.”

This weekend also marks the final games for Crimson seniors Goffredo and Brian Darcy. While it will be sad to see Goffredo and Darcy don their Crimson jerseys for the final time, Harvard basketball aficionados can be encouraged by the younger Crimson players that will lead the team in the years to come.

“I think it’s a pretty bright future, with those kids coming up,” said Goffredo, referring specifically to sophomores Housman and Harris, and freshman Jeremy Lin. “We only lose two seniors this year in myself and Brian. I think they have a lot of things to be happy about.”

—Staff writer Kevin C. Reyes can be reached at kreyes@fas.harvard.edu.