Tommy Amaker climbed the ladder, cut down the net and waved it over his head as crimson-clad fans roared. Once an Ivy League doormat, Harvard is headed to the NCAA tournament again.
Steve Moundou-Missi hit an 18ft jumper with 7.2 seconds left and the Crimson held on to beat Yale, 53-51, in the Ivy League basketball playoff. Both teams had tied for the regular season championship in the only Division I basketball league that does not have a postseason tournament.
The Crimson were led by Wesley Saunders, who scored 22 points on 8-of-15 shooting. On Harvard’s final possession, Saunders drove the lane, spun away from the basket – and passed it to Moundou-Missi, the Ivy League Defensive Player of the Year who had just missed a jumper 30 seconds earlier. This time, his shot was all cotton. “Steve has been carrying us down this last stretch,” Saunders said. “I knew they were going to collapse … and Steve knocked down the shot, like I knew he would.
Yale got one last chance. Javier Duren drove the lane, but his lay-up clanked off the back of the iron. A follow tip rimmed out, and Harvard had held on. “They pound the glass so hard, after Duren missed that shot … I was really scared,” Moundou-Missi said. “We got lucky.” Amaker said post-game he had tried to call a timeout to set up his defense before the final play, but “fortunately” the refs didn’t hear him.
Per Ken Pomeroy’s statistics, the game was a matchup of the top two defenses in the Ivy League – and, indeed, the No32 (Yale) and No54 (Harvard) defenses in the country. The game would not disappoint fans of defense-first encounters. Harvard scored the game’s first eight points, but Yale went on a 14-3 run to take a 14-11 lead. Already, almost 11 minutes had passed in the game.
The Bulldogs would go into the break with a 27-23 lead. Justin Sears, Ivy League Player of the Year, scored eight points in the first half on 4-of-6 shooting. But Harvard turned the defense on in the second. After Yale shot 52 percent in the first half, it shot just 6-of-22 (27 percent) in the second.
Yale took its largest lead, 32-27, five minutes into second half on a layup by Duren. He wouldn’t make another field goal the rest of the game (though he finished with 12 points due to 8-for-8 shooting from the line). The Bulldogs wouldn’t make score another point until Makai Mason hit a free throw with 10:27 left in the contest. By then, Harvard had 40. That 13-0 run by Harvard included nine straight by Saunders – a three-point play and back-to-back three pointers.
The turning point was a non-call during that run. Yale’s Mason was hammered in the face by Harvard’s Jonah Travis while the two were going for a rebound, but the refs missed it. After the game, Yale coach James Jones was asked about two other calls that went Harvard’s way. After Yale rallied to take a 49-48 lead on a Mason jumper with 1:47 to go, Saunders was fouled while driving to the lane. The referees initially ruled the foul came before the shot, but reversed the call after checking a court-side monitor. Saunders completed the three-point play to give the Crimson a two-point lead. Additionally, Harvard only had a chance at its final shot because the referees ruled a rebound with 33.2 seconds left went off the Bulldogs. They checked the monitor, but the call wasn’t reversed. Perhaps the footage was inconclusive, but the ball appeared to go off Harvard.
“If you coach long enough, those things are going to happen,” Jones, who has been Yale’s coach for 16 seasons, said. “You just hope that the continuation call and the basket, and call that went out of bounds on us, both don’t go against you. You hope that they even themselves out somehow. But both calls went for Harvard. … You play as hard as you can, you do as best you can, and you have the expectation that the officials are going to get it right.”
Yale had looked like it was headed to its first NCAA tournament since 1962 when it beat Harvard in Boston on earlier this month. But Dartmouth’s Gabas Maldunas hit an improbable shot with a half-second left to beat the Bulldogs the next day, setting up Saturday’s one-game playoff at a neutral site: the historic Palestra on the campus of the University of Pennsylvania.
The Ivy League used to be dominated by two teams: Penn and Princeton. This year’s playoff was the first-ever Ivy playoff to not include Princeton. The Killer P’s were the Ivy League’s representative in the NCAA tournament every year but two between the 1968-69 and 2006-07 seasons. Princeton went 16-14 this year, while the Quakers fired their coach after finishing last in the Ivy League (tied with Brown) for the first time in the program’s 117-year history.
Now the Crimson are the class of the league. Harvard is a school so devoid of hoops history its men’s basketball Wikipedia page begins with the Tommy Amaker era. (Its women’s team has a bit more: It became the only No16 seed, men’s or women’s, to upset a No1 seed when it beat Stanford in 1998.) Harvard’s previous claim to basketball fame was the record for best free-throw percentage in a season. The Crimson had never defeated a power-conference team until Amaker beat his former school, Michigan, in his first season. The Crimson didn’t win their first Ivy League basketball championship until 2011, when it tied with Princeton for the title and lost a one-game playoff on a buzzer-beater. This year’s crown, which it shared with Yale, is its fifth straight.
The turnaround was led by Amaker, who also used to coach Seton Hall, and a generous financial aid package where applicants whose families make less than $180,000 a year pay no more than 10 percent of income to attend the university. Families making less than $60,000 a year pay nothing. (The school has also been dogged by a cheating scandal – two of Amaker’s players left the team as a result – and was found guilty of recruiting violations.)
On the court, though, Amaker’s teams have been spectacular. They now head to the NCAA tournament, where they have made waves before. In 2013, the 14th-seeded Crimson upset New Mexico in the Round of 64. Last year, the No12 seed Crimson topped Cincinnati.
“Ivy titles are very hard to come by, and so we’re proud of being Ivy League champions, and we’re never going to downplay that,” Amaker said. “We’re very hopefully to have any kind of success as we move on in the national tournament.”
