Jersey Tigers

TigerBlog hopes you had a great Thanksgiving weekend.

This is the longest he goes each year without writing here. It's the four days of Thanksgiving weekend.

Did you miss him?

TB starts out this Monday with something from last week. It came from Noah Savage, the Princeton men's basketball alum and current outstanding color commentator. 

Savage, in addition to doing Princeton games and ESPN games, is also a comedian. He has started a series on YouTube of his golfing prowess, or lack thereof, that's pretty funny.

You can see it HERE.

For today's purposes, though, Savage is the straight man to another Princeton men's basketball alum, Savage's former teammate Scott Greenman. Savage posted on Twitter a picture of him from high school, when he drove to the basket against future NBA player Luol Dang.

Savage mentioned that the layup ended up hitting the wall, the implication that Dang blocked it with great ferocity.

Enter Greenman, with the perfect response:

And he didn’t even block it. Half of Noah’s layups hit the wall on their own volition.

— Scott Greenman (@Coach_Greenman) November 26, 2020

That's funny stuff.

Greenman, by the way, is an assistant coach at American, under another former Tiger, Mike Brennan. 

Savage, Greenman and Brennan all grew up in New Jersey. It got TB to wondering about New Jersey players at Princeton.

For instance, do you know who Oliver deGray Vanderbilt was? It's okay, neither did TB until a few seconds ago.

Oliver was the first Princeton men's basketball player to be named an All-American. He was actually part of the first ever All-American team, the one from the 1904-05 season. 

Ol' Oliver was part of a Princeton team that went 8-5 that year. He averaged 5.9 points per game for a team that averaged 26.5 per game.

If you take the most recent Princeton men's basketball team, the one from 2019-20, those Tigers averaged 71.5 per game, which is 2.7 times as many as the 1904-05 team. If you take Vanderbilt's average and multiply it by 2.7, you get 15.8 per game.

Anyway, Vanderbilt came to Princeton from Brick, by the Jersey Shore.

Princeton has had 11 different players win the Ivy League Player of the Year award. Of that group, four were New Jersey natives - Frank Sowinski, Bob Scrabis, Brian Earl and Spencer Weisz. A fifth, Armond Hill, spent a postgraduate year at the Lawrenceville School.

Of the non-New Jersey winners, there were four states with one player and one state with two players. Can you name the state that had multiple winners?

Princeton has had three Ivy League Defensive Players of the Year, and two of them were from New Jersey: Myles Stephens and Amir Bell.

The best Princeton men's basketball player ever to come from New Jersey?

That would be Perth Amboy's Brian Taylor, who granted only played two varsity seasons before going to the ABA. Despite that, Taylor ranks 15th all-time at Princeton with 1,239 career points (five New Jersey players are ahead of him)

Taylor's numbers at Princeton are exceeded only by Bill Bradley's, which is saying something. In fact, Bradley is the only Princeton player to score more points in a season than Taylor.

Bradley ranks 1-2-3 in points in a season (and points per game in a season). Taylor ranks 4-5, and he came within six points of tying Bradley for third.

Taylor averaged 25.0 points per game as a junior in 1971-72, after averaging 23.5 as a sophomore in 1970-71. 

Taylor went on to become the ABA Rookie of the Year the next year with the New York Nets (the forerunner of the NBA's Brooklyn Nets), and he was a two-time ABA champion and ABA all-star. If you don't know what the ABA was, look it up. Better yet, watch some YouTube highlights. It was the most fun basketball ever played.

He would move over the NBA in 1976-77 and average 17 points per game for the Kansas City Kings (now Sacramento). He played in the NBA until the 1981-82 season, and he returned to Princeton a year later to graduate before embarking on a long and successful career in education. 

The only reason he wasn't the Ivy Player of the Year was because there wasn't one yet when he played.

Oh, and the state with more than one Ivy Player of the Year? That state actually produced two players who both won the award twice. That would be Illinois, with Craig Robinson and Kit Mueller.