History with the Harvard Squad

This team was supposed to be defined by the scandal.

This team’s only senior averaged sixteen minutes a game last year.

This team’s second tallest rotation player is 6-7. Princeton’s shortest starter is 6-5.

This team wasn’t supposed to win the Ivy League.

But here we are.

The Harvard men’s basketball team (19-9, 11-3 Ivy) has faced adversity all season long. From the opening game, a 67-64 loss on a UMass wing trey with three seconds to go, to the road sweep last week at the hands of the Killer P’s, nothing has come easy. Losing graduates Keith Wright and Oliver McNally was going to be hard enough, but the withdrawals of Brandyn Curry and Kyle Casey in the wake of the Gov 1310 scandal forced the team to change the entire way it played.

Somehow, the team found an answer for every stumbling block.

Suddenly, freshman point guard Siyani Chambers was thrust into the starter’s role without a true backup. He was up to the challenge. Chambers played every game, leading the team in assists and minutes played. Without a strong inside post presence, coach Tommy Amaker reverted to unorthodox four-guard lineups featuring Chambers, sophomore Wesley Saunders, junior Laurent Rivard, and senior Christian Webster. No matter. The Crimson shot 39.9% from behind the arc, good for third in the nation. After losing four of its top five scorers, Harvard lacked a go-to scorer. Saunders stepped up. The sophomore led the Ivy league with an efficient 16.5 point a game on 54 percent shooting from the field (53 percent from three) and led the team in steals while serving as its best perimeter defender.

The Crimson will enter the NCAA tournament as a likely 14 or 15 seed. The team’s nonconference schedule is chock-full of near-misses; chances to post statement wins at UConn, St. Mary’s, and Memphis resulted in close losses. It posted only four wins in conference play by double digits, with eight games decided by fewer than seven points. However, Harvard heads into the tournament with recent history on its side.

Since 2010, Ivy League teams have posted a respectable 2-3 record in March Madness. The Cornell Sweet Sixteen team of 2010 is in a class of its own. That squad posted an absurd 15.4 average margin of victory en route to a 13-1 Ancient Eight record and dismantled Temple and Wisconsin by a combined 34 points in its first two tournament games. The next year, a 25-7 Princeton Squad held its ground start-to-finish against a Kentucky team that made the Final Four and sent 5 players to the NBA in a 59-57 loss. Last year, the Crimson fell to a talented Vanderbilt squad, 79-70, that recorded one of two wins over national champion Kentucky and had starters Festus Ezeli, John Jenkins, and Jeffrey Taylor drafted in the first 31 picks of the 2012 NBA draft.

In addition, the Crimson's post-season chances are boosted by the recent trend of parity in college basketball. Whether it is the preponderance of ‘one-and-done’ freshmen that sprint to the NBA after one year of college hoops or improved recruiting in the Ivy League, the numbers point to parity across the college basketball landscape. Only two years ago two mid-major programs made the Final Four.  The current number one team in the nation, Gonzaga, hails from the historically impotent West Coast Conference. Now, more than ever, any team has a shot at cutting down the nets.

Unfortunately for Crimson fans, the numbers also show that this Harvard team isn’t nearly as dominant as those other Ancient Eight squads. While the three previous squads had average margins of victory of over eight and a half points a game, this Crimson squad checks in with nearly half that at four and a half. Ranked 151st of the country in defensive efficiency according to stats guru Kem Pomeroy, the Crimson rank near the bottom of all of college basketball in every rebounding category.

The saving grace of this Harvard team is its ability to fill the basket up in a hurry – a handy skill come March. With the second best true shooting percentage – a metric measuring a team’s overall shooting ability—in the nation, Harvard can shoot with anyone. The ability to make threes can take lower seeded teams deep in the tournament.  Just ask Stephen Curry’s Davidson squad, Brad Stevens’ Butler teams, or even Jeff Foote’s Cornell team.

With no rotation player larger than 6-8, the Crimson will inevitably be smaller than its on-court opponents. Like they have been all year, the team will be underdogs fighting upward battles. This team wasn’t supposed to be here. Now that it is, history and the magic of the three may prove its saving graces.

—Staff writer David Freed can be reached at davidfreed@college.harvard.edu. Follow her on Twitter @CrimsonDPFreed.