A Weekend Like No Other

The clock ticked under 15 seconds and all that was left was for Princeton to dribble out the clock on its 74-65 win over Yale in the Ivy League tournament men's championship game.

The large Jadwin Gym crowd, at least those in Orange and Black, rose in appreciation, loudly showering the Tigers with congratulations on a job really, really well done. A weekend that had started with eight minutes of perfect basketball Friday was now finishing with a standing ovation.

And with that, the greatest weekend Jadwin has ever seen came to a close. Well, maybe not a close. There was still the last touch of icing on this 48 hours of Princeton Basketball that is now firmly etched into the legacy of two programs.

The icing came in the form of the joint NCAA tournament Selection Show party, the one featuring the Princeton men and women, who won their own Ivy League tournament title this weekend as well. If ever there was a time for a Jadwin party, it was last night. 

And with that the fun, and the work, which this week will be one and the same, really began. 

For the record, the NCAA matchups will see the men, seeded 15th, take on second-seeded Arizona in Sacramento at 4:10 Thursday afternoon (that's Eastern time) and the women, seeded 10th, face seventh-seeded North Carolina State Friday in Salt Lake City.

There will be plenty of time this week to talk about those games. And to talk about Sondre Guttormsen's third NCAA championship in the pole vault, this time in all-time collegiate record fashion.

For today, though, TigerBlog has to talk about the weekend that just transpired, the one he without hesitation called the greatest in Jadwin history, a statement he will stand by. As TB said last week, the building had a different feel to it in the days leading up to the tournament. That was upped considerably once the games actually arrived.

The building itself was dressed up like never before. TB has been to more than his share of NCAA tournament games, and this is what the Ivy tournament felt like. By the way, this didn't happen accidentally. It took a great deal of effort on the parts of the staffs of Princeton and the Ivy office.

The crowds were great. They were loud. They were into it.

The players? There were displays of the great skills of the two Most Outstanding Players, Princeton's Kaitlyn Chen and Tosan Evbuomwan. There were huge clutch moments, by players like, among others, Princeton's Ellie Mitchell and Caden Pierce and Harvard's McKenzie Forbes (in the overtime against Columbia).

The games? There were six total between the men and the women, and only one was decided by double figures. One went to overtime. Another was tied with just over a minute to go.

As TB said, the weekend began Friday with eight minutes of basketball by the Princeton women that can only be described as "perfect." Princeton sprinted out to a 16-0 lead over Penn and then withheld a bit of a Quaker rally to win 60-47. Harvard then defeated Columbia in overtime in the other semifinal, led along by Forbes, who outscored the Lions by herself in the OT (9-7) to finish with 27 points in the 72-65 Crimson win.

This set up a Princeton-Harvard final Saturday at 5. Before that, though, there were the men's semis, in which Yale sprinted away from Cornell in the second half to win 80-60 before Princeton defeated Penn 77-70 despite being down one with 4:31 left. 

The win was Princeton's second in a week over the Quakers, and it continued Tiger head coach Mitch Henderson's extraordinary success against his team's longtime rival. Henderson, as a player, started out 0-4 against Penn. His teams then went 5-0 for the rest of his career, and he's now 21-4 as a head coach, making him 26-8 combined (but hey, that's a story for another time).

So now it was the women's championship game. Two weeks earlier, in the regular season game against Harvard on the same Jadwin court, Princeton trailed by 10 at the half. In the final, Princeton trailed by nine at the half.

Harvard held the lead all the way through the third quarter in both. Harvard led deep into the fourth quarter in both. Actually, Princeton didn't take the lead until the last minute in both. 

Throw in the first game of the year between Princeton and Harvard, which the Crimson won in Cambridge in the first Ivy game of the year, and you have some extraordinary numbers. In 120 minutes of game time between the three games, Princeton had the lead for exactly 3:58. That's three minutes and 58 seconds. And yet the Tigers were 2-1 in those games. 

In the two wins, Princeton outscored Harvard by a combined 33-12 in the fourth quarter. In the loss, Princeton was outscored 25-23 in the fourth quarter. That would be more than twice as many points allowed than in the next two games combined.

In short, somewhere between New Year's Eve in Cambridge and late February and March in Princeton, a lot changed for the Tigers. What was most remarkable was the calmness Princeton showed down the stretch in both games, knowing that a loss in the regular season would have cost a championship and a loss in the final would have cost a trip to the NCAA.

That, by the way, is a team that is clearly a reflection of its head coach, Carla Berube, who is defined by her combination of fierce competitiveness and mild demeanor.

How did Princeton pull out the final? First, by allowing only a single point in the final 5:06 of the game and forcing Harvard to miss its final seven shots. Then, Mitchell put the Tigers up 49-48 on a basket with 50 seconds left. After a Crimson miss with 38 seconds left, Mitchell grabbed her 15th and final rebound of the night and was fouled immediately.

With the game on the line, what did the 47 percent career free throw shooter do? Good. Good. Now that's toughness.

Final score: Princeton 54, Harvard 48.

The men's final was yesterday at noon. It matched Princeton against a Yale team that had swept the Tigers in the regular season, including erasing a 19-point deficit at Jadwin to win in overtime 93-83. 

There was also the residue of last year's Ivy League tournament. You remember that. Yale defeated Princeton, the outright champ in 2022, 66-64 to get the league's NCAA tournament bid.

How would Princeton handle the residue of those two scarring experiences? Flawlessly, it turned out.

Princeton led 9-0 and 12-3 but then saw Yale come back, twice taking leads late in the first half. Princeton was up one at 30-29 with Yale in possession with a chance to take the lead at the break, but a Bulldog miss, an Evbuomwan rebound and three-quarter court pass to Caden Pierce resulted in a three-point shot that just beat the buzzer (and was shot over the distraction of a collision right in front of Pierce between Yale's Isaiah Kelly and Princeton's Zach Martini).

Instead of down, Princeton was up four. That's the kind of game it was. Princeton had every answer. Pierce, the Ivy Rookie of the Year, made another huge play with a little more than a minute to go with a huge offensive rebound and two foul shots after being fouled that basically ended Yale's last hope.

When it was over, the party started.

Or, better yet, continued. This glorious weekend at Jadwin, it turned out, was one big Princeton party.