Men’s Basketball Aims For Historic Road Trip

Nearing midnight on Tuesday in Currier House, a group of students huddled around a table in the dining hall scrambling to finish a problem set, while others sat down the hall watching the end of SportsCenter. Alone in the Cardio Room, running a full sprint on the treadmill, was junior Brandyn Curry.

“I’ve got to chase Zack Rosen up and down the court for 40 minutes on Friday,” explained Curry, as he wiped the sweat off his forehead moments after finishing his workout—his second of the day.

Curry is not the only one looking ahead to his meeting with the Penn standout this Friday when the No. 21/25 Crimson (20-2, 6-0 Ivy) visits the Quakers (12-10, 4-1).

Ivy League basketball fans have already been drooling over the point guard matchup, which pits Rosen, the Ivy League’s second leading scorer, against Curry, arguably the conference’s top perimeter defender. Whichever player wins that matchup has a good shot at leading his team to victory.

“He’s been by far the focal point of their team,” said co-captain Oliver McNally of Rosen, who enters Friday’s matchup averaging 18.3 points and 6.0 assists per game. “When he’s going, they’re going as a team, and if he has an off night, I think they haven’t been too successful as a team. He’s going to be the main focus of our defense.”

Much of the responsibility for slowing Rosen will fall on the shoulders of Curry, a 6’1” guard who is routinely charged with the unenviable task of matching up with opposing team’s top perimeter scorers, a task with which he has had much success.

“I think Brandyn is one of the premier defensive players in the country, and that matchup is definitely going to be tough for Penn,” junior Kyle Casey said.

While Harvard coach Tommy Amaker said he plans on rotating a number of different players onto Rosen throughout the contest, Curry will get the first crack at the 6’1” lefty who leads the conference in minutes played (38.1 per game) and connects on 41.5 percent of his attempts from beyond the arc.

“My strategy is to just go in there and make everything tough for him the whole game, all 40 minutes,” Curry said. “Just hound him on defense and then make him work on offense.”

Friday’s matchup will be the fifth time the two point guards have gone head-to-head. In the past, Curry—and the rest of the Crimson defense—has had success against Rosen, limiting the senior to 16 points per game on 32.6 percent shooting while forcing an average of six turnovers per contest. Not surprisingly, Harvard came out on top in all four matchups.

But that’s not to say the wins came easily. When Curry first visited Penn’s Palestra in 2010, the Crimson needed all 40 minutes to dispose of the Quakers. Last year, it took two overtimes before Harvard came away with the 83-82 victory.

This year’s Penn team is expected to pose another challenge to the Ivy League favorites. In addition to Rosen, Penn boasts a pair of talented guards in senior Tyler Bernardini and sophomore Miles Cartwright.

Bernardini—who currently sits fifth in the conference in scoring, averaging 14.9 points per game—can stroke it from beyond the arc, shooting a league-best 43.2 percent from three. Cartwright is the third Quakers guard among the Ivy League’s top 20 scorers, posting 10.2 points per game.

After squaring off against Penn’s talented guards on Friday, the Crimson will face a much different opponent on Saturday when it visits Princeton for the first time since the Tigers sent Harvard to the NIT, Doug-Davis style.

This year’s Princeton squad has a different look. The Tigers lost head coach Sydney Johnson and graduated two of their three best players—Kareem Maddox, last season’s Ivy League Defensive Player of the Year, and Dan Mavraides, the three-point specialist Crimson fans loved to hate.

But Princeton (11-10, 2-3) is still capable of knocking off talented opponents, as evidenced by its triple-overtime victory over No. 17 Florida State on Dec. 30, just over a month after Harvard took down the Seminoles.

Junior Ian Hummer, a 6’7” forward who leads the Tigers, averaging 17.1 points and 7.6 rebounds per game, will pose a challenge for Crimson forwards Keith Wright and Kyle Casey.

“Hummer is as good as anybody in our league,” Amaker said. “He’s rough, he’s rugged, [and] he’s tough inside.”

Containing Hummer will be key for Harvard as it looks to pick up its first win at Princeton’s Jadwin Gymnasium since 1989.

If the Crimson was to win both games this weekend, it would mark the first time since the 1984-85 season that the Crimson swept the Penn-Princeton series on the road.

For Curry, doing so would mean that the hard work and extra workouts had paid off.

“It’s something that we haven’t discussed as a team, but everyone wants [a sweep] very badly,” Curry said.

—Staff writer Martin Kessler can be reached at martin.kessler@college.harvard.edu.