The Weekend In Ivy Hoops

Okay, that was a terrible call and an awful way to end a great game. 

And that's all TigerBlog needs to say about the Super Bowl.

So on to basketball. Which buzzer-beater was more impressive?

Was it the one TigerBlog showed you last week from the New Jersey City-Rowan game, or was it this one from over the weekend, between Portland State and Northern Arizona? 

This is so unbelievable. pic.twitter.com/1jhqQvS9eJ

— Rush the Other 26 (@other26hoops) February 11, 2023

That's close. The one in the Portland State game was extraordinary. It was extraordinary just to get the shot off, let alone have it go in, let alone do it all in 0.4 seconds. The one from last week required more, with a made three-pointer, a great steal off the inbounds pass and then something of a miraculous three to win it.

It's really tough to pick one over the other. Either way, it's hard to imagine another ending this season will challenge those two — until it does.

The weekend in Ivy League basketball didn't have any endings that were quite so dramatic. Of the eight games played between the men and women, only three were closer than 10 points and none was closer than six (Penn women over Harvard 70-64). 

The average margin of the men's games was 15 points; the average margin of the women's games was 20.3. The average of all eight games was 17.5.

Is that a function of only playing one game versus two in a weekend? Was it the matchups? Was it the home courts? A combination of all of that? 

The home teams went 6-2 in the league this weekend, 3-1 on the men's side and 3-1 on the women's side.

As TB wrote that, it got him wondering about the entire season. To date, there have been 80 Ivy games played. On the men's side, the home team is 25-15. 

On the women's side, he figured the home court wouldn't matter as much, because there seems to be more of a separation among the teams. as it turns out, the home team on the women's side is 23-17. Added up, and the record is 48-32, which means home teams have won 60 percent of the games.

The NCAA selections are three weeks from Sunday. The Ivy League tournament begins two days earlier in Jadwin Gym. 

Each Ivy team has played 10 games, so there are four more to go in the regular season. Each team will play a back-to-back this weekend, with single games the next two after that. 

For Princeton, this weekend means Brown Friday night and Yale Saturday night, with the men home and the women away. The regular season will end with single-game weekends with Harvard (women home) and Penn (men home).

The women's team defeated Dartmouth 64-47 behind 16 points from Kaitlyn Chen and 13 more from freshman Madison St. Rose, who now has at least 13 in six straight games and eight of the last nine. Princeton has now won nine straight since starting 0-2 in the league, with eight straight league wins.

As a result, Princeton is tied atop the league standings with Columbia, also 8-2. Harvard was tied as well until a loss to Penn Saturday dropped the Crimson to 7-3, tied for third with the Quakers. Yale is 5-5, with everyone else with at least seven losses.

The Princeton men fell at Dartmouth 83-76, which coupled with the Yale win over Columbia left the Tigers and Bulldogs tied for first at 7-3. 

As John Thompson III always said, the goal is to be in first at the end of each weekend.

The men's race seems to be a bit more crowded than the women's. Behind the two first-place teams are Brown and Penn at 6-4 and then Cornell and Dartmouth at 5-5. 

Who holds the tiebreakers? It doesn't matter yet. Now it's all about wins and losses. 

Next weekend will say a great deal. Again, how big a deal with the home court be? What changes the second time around? Is anyone able to sustain momentum from one week to the next? Can teams that lost this weekend turn it around again?

The season has reached the fun part.