Harvard and Princeton are two of the better defensive teams in the Ivies this year, which really isn’t saying much (Cornell might be the worst defensive team in the country…). Both teams have a few very good shooters, and a few other guys who are capable of either shooting their teams in or out of a game; I expect both coaches to try to force the other team’s inconsistent shooters to beat them. Means that the game could come down to whether Pigge for us or Happy for them makes their threes—or whether we can generate more open looks for Batties, Barbour, and Hunt, or they can for Stanton and Hicke.
All of which is to say that I don’t expect Henderson to gift Batties open looks off of pick and pops like Hovde inexplicably did. I’d expect Princeton’s big to stay attached to Batties on ball screens and their guard to drop and dare our dribbler to pull up from three. If Hinton and Pigge aren’t hitting from three—and they’re streaky at best—I think we’ll need to lean more on a Hunt-Batties ball screen action since Hunt is our one guy who can create off the dribble and shoot well from three.
Final point: we need to be physical on the boards without fouling. Also expect Henderson to try to post us up a lot.
Davis killed Penn on post ups. Definitely something to watch out for.
He and Hicke are the only guys with post-up games.
Unless Princeton sizes down to match up with us, Batties should have a pretty good quickness advantage. He was able to take advantage of a similar mismatch last week on a bunch of drives, so that could be a big key for us; just have to be smart avoiding charges.
When we get Batties his shots, we usually look good. It’s the games where we forget about him or don’t try to set him up that we can really struggle.
Amazing comeback win. 14pts with 3:20 left!
We totally collapsed.
Probably our second best win since the pandemic. (Giving Yale their only Ivy loss last year was the only better one. And yes, it’s been a bad five years…)
We had so many defensive lapses on shooters and did such a poor job on the boards—it seemed like Princeton got every 50/50 ball for 37 minutes—but we never stopped coming. It’s a gritty group. Princeton started playing to waste clock on offense and not to foul on defense and let us get some confidence with a couple of easy ones. The couple of inbound turnovers and the Pigge threes were huge, obviously, as was everything Hinton did at the end. I thought the Hicke miss at the start of overtime was also really big; that could have been a momentum shifter (also not sure why Princeton went away from him so much at the end, but glad they did).
Feels like whoever got this one was going to grt a season-changing win. Wow what a game.
Kenpom gave Princeton a 99% chance to win with 3 minutes to go.
KenPom didn’t see the Penn game. Barely held onto a huge lead late at home. On the road, we were not so lucky.