The Weekend In Hoops

TigerBlog saw a story the other day that said that 181 million people had bought Valentine's Day gifts for their sweethearts.

Women, by the way, were twice as likely to make a Valentine's Day gift than men were. Add up all the spending, and it comes to $19 billion on gifts, and that's nothing compared to the $31 billion spent on going out for the holiday.

The most interesting part of the story that TB read was that even with all of that, nine percent of women adamantly do NOT want a Valentine's Day gift and would prefer to have their partner give them the same gift on a different day.

That number seemed a bit high.

Just short of 8,000 people spent their Valentine's Day evening watching Ivy League basketball Friday night. Does anything say "romantic" more than that?

There were 551 in New Haven to see the Princeton women take on Yale in a game that had a huge impact on the Ivy standings.

Princeton came into the game unbeaten in the league. Yale came into the game with just a single league loss.

This was one of those "the math is obvious" games.

There was more math too. Yale came in as the top-ranked scoring offense team in the league, at nearly 75 points per game. Princeton came in leading Division I scoring defense, at fewer than 48 per game.

So what happened?

Well, if your Valentine's Day dinner kept you from getting there for tip-off and you didn't arrive until seven minutes or so had elapsed, then you saw 1) a score of 12-0 Yale and 2) a home team that was dripping with confidence at that point.

TB was watching the game on ESPN+, and he wasn't particularly concerned that this was about to become a blowout. Even someone as confident as TB, though, couldn't have guessed the exact path the game would take.

Why didn't TB think this was going to be one of those nights for Princeton? Because when you defend like Princeton can, you'll never be out of a game.

And if TB had any doubts at all, they were erased on the possession when Yale held an 18-13 lead. Princeton swarmed the Bulldogs everywhere, and Yale was forced to take a difficult shot as the shot clock was about to expire.

Princeton took its first lead at 20-19 with a little more than two minutes left in the half. It was 29-21 Tigers at the break, and the final would be 55-39 Princeton.

The win was big against a good team, and it gave Princeton a two-game lead in the loss column.

Princeton followed that up by taking down Brown 85-48 Saturday night in Providence. The sweep left Princeton at 19-1 overall and 7-0 in the Ivy League, followed by Penn at 5-2 and then every other team with at least three losses after the Quakers won at Yale Saturday as well.

Next weekend starts a run of five games in eight days for the women, all at home, against Harvard and Dartmouth Friday and Saturday, against Penn the following Tuesday and then another weekend against Brown and Yale.

As for the men, Friday night didn't go so well, as Yale defeated the Tigers 88-64 at Jadwin in a matchup of teams who were tied for first place in the league.

What did Princeton do 24 hours later? It did what good teams have to do - put that loss aside and bounce back in a big way.

Princeton defeated Brown 73-54 behind a career-high 21 from Ethan Wright, who was 8 for 9 on the night, 3 for 4 from three-point range.

The Tigers came out sizzling and built a 13-point lead, never letting Brown get into the game. This was a Brown team, by the way, that would have been tied for first place in the league with a win, a Brown team that defeated Penn Friday night.

So where do the Ivy standings sit right now?

Princeton and Yale are tied for first at 6-2. Brown, Penn and Harvard are all 5-3. This is a great race for the championship and for the Ivy League tournament spots, which go to the top four teams.

And that was the weekend in hoops for Princeton.

As former men's head coach John Thompson used to say, the goal at the end of the weekend is to be in first place. Both the men and the women have achieved that goal for another weekend.