A Two-Topic Thursday

TigerBlog has two topics for your Thursday.

First, he was right.

Bella Alarie was the Ivy League Player of the Year in women's basketball.

The 2019 All-Ivy women's basketball team was announced yesterday, and, not surprisingly, Alarie was named the league's top player. Somewhat surprisingly, she was not a unanimous selection, though perhaps the fact that she missed the first nine games of the year due to injury counted against her.

You can add this to the fact that Jesper Horsted was not a unanimous selection in football this past fall as things that grab your attention.

Alarie's season was dominant in every possible way, with 23.0 points per game, 10.7 rebounds per game, two 40+ point games, three other 30+ point games, a 51 percent shooting percentage, a dominant defensive presence, great passing, uncanny ballhandling skills for someone 6-4 and essentially every skill you'd want in a basketball player.

For instance, she led the team in assists per game at 3.4. Is there any player her height who led her team in assists per game this year?

Alarie was at least a unanimous first-team All-Ivy League selection. That was a formality.

TigerBlog was happy to see Carlie Littlefield was a first-team pick as well. The sophomore from Iowa was her fierce self all season, averaging just under 14 points per game, leading the team in three-point field goal percentage and scoring in double figures in 12 of 14 league games.

And none of that really is what defines her. As TB said, her ferocity on the court is infectious, and she is able to lift everyone on her team through effort alone. Make no mistake. Princeton is more than just Alarie, and there would have been no Ivy League title without Littlefield.

The same is true of a bunch of other players on the roster, none of whom earned any All-Ivy honors, not even Gabrielle Rush, with her 12.4 points per game and 78 three-pointers. Nor was Courtney Banghart the league Coach of the Year.

Of course, when the Ivy League tournament tips off Saturday at Yale, honors will mean nothing. Princeton opens with Cornell at 6 (after the men play Yale at 3:30), and then the winner of that game plays the winner of Harvard-Penn Sunday at 4 for the league's automatic NCAA bid.

Princeton is assured of its 10th straight postseason trip, with no worse than a WNIT bid if the Tigers do not win the league tournament and NCAA bid that goes with it.

And that's women's basketball, for now.

Topic No. 2 is men's hockey.

There was huge news out of Princeton earlier this week with the signing of NHL contracts by seniors Max Veronneau, Ryan Kuffner and Josh Teves.

The Princeton men's hockey season saw a parade of NHL scouts come to Baker Rink to check out those three, and it seemed like every week there was another rumor about where they'd end up. None of the three had been drafted before coming to Princeton,  and in hockey, that's your only chance to get drafted. Once they were in college they were going to be free agents, which worked out better for them.

In the end, the scorecard looks like this: Veronneau to the Ottawa Senators, Kuffner to the Detroit Red Wings, Teves to the Vancouver Canucks. As an aside, TigerBlog was on the Senators bandwagon when they had former Princeton goalie Mike Condon and then gave up on them when they gave up on him. Now he's back on board.

Veronneau apparently will be with the team for the rest of the season, which is great, especially considering that he's an Ottawa native.

All three are extraordinary players, obviously, and then made watching Princeton men's hockey a lot of fun the last few years, beyond just the run to the ECAC championship and NCAA tournament a year ago. Every time they were on the ice, there was the potential for something exciting to happen, and their superior skills were obvious even to an uneducated hockey observer like TB.

Between them you have three of the top nine scorers in program history, as well as the career leader in goals (Kuffner), the single-season leader in points (Veronneau) and the all-time leader in assists by a defenseman (Teves).

TigerBlog wishes them the best. He's looking forward to seeing them in the pros. And, as he understands it, all three planned well for this and will finish their theses and graduate with their class.

And that's your two-topic Thursday.

Two topics. Five extraordinary athletes.