The Hunters

No matter what happened Saturday evening in a packed Levien Gym, the season would hardly be over for the Princeton women's basketball team.

Still ... this wasn't just another Ivy League women's basketball game. Not at all.

Princeton walked into its game at Columbia Saturday in an unfamiliar situation. The Tigers were the hunter, not the hunted. 

This was the situation: Columbia came in one game ahead of Princeton with six to play. A Lions win would have meant a two-game lead with five to go; a Princeton win would mean the two teams would be tied atop the league. Princeton had to have a big night after playing Friday night at Cornell and then making the four-hour ride to New York City.

It wasn't win or else for the season, since the automatic NCAA tournament bid will be decided at the Ivy League tournament in Jadwin Gym the second weekend of March. As far as the league championship went, though, well, realistically Princeton had no chance of winning another one without winning the game Saturday night. 

Columbia, after all, had only one league loss in its first eight games, and it avenged that one Friday night by beating Penn 72-50. Columbia had already beaten Princeton at Jadwin (58-55 in overtime), and its other six Ivy games saw the Lions go 6-0 and win each by at least 20 points.

That was the challenge for Princeton. It was a loud, involved crowd, one that exploded when Columbia started the game by hitting a three-pointer.

The final score? Princeton 74-56. It was 21-11 Tigers at the end of the first quarter, 36-21 at the break and never closer than 10 in the second half.

Columbia, which came into the game averaging nearly 82 per game, good for 11th in Division I, was held to a season low in points. It was more than just a win. It was a statement win. 

Instead of being two back of Columbia, Princeton is now tied with the Lions at 7-2 after its 0-2 start. The other team who beat Princeton was Harvard, who is also 7-2 after a sweep of Yale and Brown this weekend. 

Those three are one game ahead of 6-3 Penn, followed by 5-4 Yale. The top four will advance to Jadwin.

In addition to the win, Princeton's Julia Cunningham became the 27th Princeton women's player to reach 1,000 career points with a three-pointer in the fourth quarter as part of her 15-point night. She was one of four Tigers in double figures, along with Kaitlyn Chen (16), Madison St. Rose (14) and Grace Stone (13). Ellie Mitchell had nine points and 17 rebounds. 

This game was won with defense, of course. Princeton held Columbia to that season low and did so 26.2 percent shooting for the night.

The game was long decided when, with 21 seconds left, a missed Princeton shot was rolling to the corner. Mitchell, in a dead sprint, almost caught up to it before it went out of bounds. Even though she didn't quite get there, to make that kind of effort that late in a game that was out of hand shows just what Mitchell is all about, not to mention her teammates.

Princeton has five regular season games remaining, starting with Dartmouth at home Saturday afternoon. Then it's trip to Brown and Yale the following weekend, with single games at home against Harvard and then at Penn to end it. The men have the opposite schedule. 

Speaking of the men, they came into the weekend in a first-place tie with Cornell and left it one game up on Yale after sweeping the Big Red and Columbia at Jadwin.

The men's standings now have Princeton at 7-2, followed by 6-3 Yale and Cornell, Penn and Brown all at 5-4. Dartmouth is 4-5, with Harvard at 3-6 and Columbia at 1-8.

As an aside, TigerBlog hasn't looked this up, but he can't imagine the Ivy League has had too many years where it had all of its men's and women's teams with at least two losses after only nine games.

For today, that's all TB will say about the weekend of men's basketball at Jadwin.

He'll have much more on the subject tomorrow.