Notebook: Freshmen Aiken, Bruner, Oni Shine in Ivy Semifinal, Harvard's Shooters Come Up Short

A frantic second half comeback spearheaded by freshman guard Bryce Aiken was not enough as the Harvard men’s basketball team fell to Yale, 73-71, in the semifinals of Saturday’s inaugural Ivy League Tournament.

The Bulldogs advanced to Sunday afternoon’s conference championship, in which they will take on top-seeded Princeton. The Tigers downed Penn, 72-64 in overtime, in the day’s first semifinal. It was the third loss in a row for a Crimson team that dropped five conference games by a combined 13 points. The third time proved to be the charm for a Yale team (18-10) that fell to Harvard (18-10) twice in the regular season.

SIGN OF THINGS TO COME

The Ivy League has come a long way over the last 46 years. While the 2016-2017 campaign is notable for being the first one in which the Ancient Eight has had a conference tournament, the 1971-1972 season was the first in which freshmen were allowed to play on varsity athletics teams. The decisive minutes of Saturday’s second men’s semifinal were dominated by players who would not have been eligible before 1971 and were high school juniors when Harvard downed the Bulldogs in the 2015 Ivy League play-in game to receive an NCAA Tournament berth.

Crimson guard Bryce Aiken and Yale’s Jordan Bruner and Miye Oni have played key roles for their clubs this season and the teams’ biggest matchup of the year proved to be no different. As has been the case whenever the Crimson is down this season, the ball was in the freshly minted Ivy League Rookie of the Year’s hands down the stretch. Harvard coach Tommy Amaker was running isolation plays for Aiken and the Bulldog defense did not have a consistent answer for the undersized lead guard.

“I thought he was tremendous,” Amaker said. “His spirit, his shot-making ability, his creativity. He carried us to give us an opportunity to pull this one out.”

Like Aiken, Bruner was relatively quiet in the first frame, registering just four points and the same number of rebounds. Instead, Oni was the catalyst for a Yale team that went into the locker room holding an eight-point lead that would grow to 13 before the second half’s first media timeout. The Porter Ranch, Calif. native provided the floor spacing the Bulldogs lacked in their two meetings with Harvard this season. Oni was hitting jumpers that the Crimson defense was begging Yale’s perimeter players to take in Cambridge and New Haven. The freshman went 5-for-10 from the field during a half in which his team shot 44 percent from the field. Not bad for someone who was going toe-to-toe with the Notre Dame High School Knights in a California state playoff game this time last year.

“The kid Oni, he’s tremendous,” Amaker said. “You’re seeing in a lot of young players that are in our conference, they’re going to play a lot of good basketball as the years go on. We’re very hopeful that we’ll get better, but I do think you see progression of our conference as a whole.”

Six Aiken field goals got Harvard back into the type of game that the Crimson has become accustomed to playing with its archrivals. After the teams traded baskets once Harvard got to within two with 4:30 to play, Bruner sandwiched jumpers between a putback by Crimson freshman forward Chris Lewis to put his team up four. Aiken’s answer came with 1:55 to play. His spin move and ensuing jumper from the free throw line got Harvard back within two.

While Oni’s jump shooting and the floor spacing it created haunted the Crimson early in the game, it was his exclamation point with 91 seconds to play that Amaker and freshman swingman Justin Bassey are most likely to remember when the teams meet again next winter. The small forward crossed over Bassey and proceeded to posterize the Denver native with a slam that caused a frenzy in the Yale student section. Bassey was charged with a foul, Oni hit the free throw, and the Bulldog lead stood at five, the largest it had been since the 8:48 mark.

Aiken answered with a three to push his game total to 28 and everyone in the arena knew who was getting the ball with 21 ticks to play and Harvard down three. The generously listed six-footer missed a three with 13 seconds to go but the Crimson got a second chance after Yale could not cleanly corral the rebound. Bruner picked off a Siyani Chambers pass and proceeded to knock down a free throw to punch the Bulldogs’ ticket to Sunday’s final. All told, Oni and Bruner combined for 29 points on 11-of-21 shooting. The duo accounted for eight of Yale’s final nine points and Oni’s dunk and Bruner’s steal to end Chambers’ college career added another chapter to a rivalry that will only grow in the coming years.

“They use [Aiken] a lot and that’s why they went to get him,” Bruner said. “We have talented players on this team but we just don’t need to use them [as much], [since] we play together. We have some of the best players in the league so we just play together instead of playing that way.”

CHANGE FOR THE WORSE

For all of Aiken’s magic, his teammates could not find a similar shooting touch on Saturday. Despite putting up 77 field goal attempts, Harvard shot just 35 percent from the field. Corey Johnson, Seth Towns, and Chambers combined to go just 4-of-30 from the field.

“You look at Towns and Corey Johnson, different guys, we ordinarily need them to make shots for us and today was one of the days where we weren’t able to do it and the shooting percentages weren’t very good,” Amaker said.

The third meeting between the Ivy League’s biggest rivals bore little resemblance to the teams’ two February matchups. While the Crimson rode hot shooting to neutralize the Elis’ rebounding advantage earlier in the season, Harvard flipped the script at the Palestra. The Crimson won the rebounding battle and gathered 18 offensive boards. Despite its efforts on the glass, Harvard was rewarded with a mere 15 second chance points.

Oni was the key to opening up the Crimson on the other end. The freshman only averaged 8.5 points in the teams’ two prior meetings, during which Yale shot 43 percent. On Saturday, Oni had 18 and his team made nearly 48 percent of its shots.

Amaker often alludes to the fact that Harvard goes as Chambers goes. On Saturday, Chambers was not going and his non-Aiken teammates found themselves in similar shooting funks. While he only averaged 12 points against the Bulldogs going into the game, Chambers had been efficient, converting nine of his 19 tries. Chambers was 1-of-6 from the field in his 35 minutes of action on Saturday.

Towns entered Philadelphia having won three consecutive Ivy League Rookie of the Week honors. The Columbus, Ohio native struggled defensively and could not get in a rhythm on the other end, missing 13 of his 16 shots. He combined with Aiken for 40 points in the Crimson’s 77-64 win over the Bulldogs two weekends ago.

To make matters worse, Johnson was unable to snap out of his shooting slump. The Ottawa native missed Harvard’s two games against Columbia and Cornell over Presidents’ Day Weekend due to an illness and has not been the same since. Since Amaker replaced Johnson in the starting lineup with Aiken, Johnson has not been the knockdown three-point shooter that Crimson fans have come to know.

Before Feb. 24, Johnson was shooting 44.6 percent from long range in eight conference games. His 44.3 percent mark through 23 games would have put him eighth nationally in three-point field goal percentage had he maintained that clip. Instead, Johnson has converted just five of his last 20 three-point field goals, including none of his six long-range attempts on Saturday.

“Our shooting performance, our percentages were just awful,” Amaker said. “It’s going to be very hard to win a game like this, shooting the ball the way we did this afternoon.”

—Staff writer Stephen J. Gleason can be reached at stephen.gleason@thecrimson.com.