Alternate Research

TigerBlog was talking to Princeton Athletics superfan Duncan Yin the other day about the propensity of the men's basketball team to come from way back to win games in the most dramatic fashion.

At one point of their conversation, Yin — Class of 1982, by the way — brought up something that would require a bit of research. TB thought it was a great idea, until the next day, when he couldn't remember what it was. 

When TB asked Yin if he remembered, this was the response he got: 

"Don’t hit this ball back over the net at me.  I’m not prepared." TB is pretty sure that means that he couldn't remember what they'd talked about either.

Oh well. It was something good. It'll come to TB at some point. 

Yin, by the way, is a fan of pretty much every sport across the board and is very well-versed on all of them. In fact, he's the kind of fan TigerBlog would be if he hadn't spent the last four decades writing about Princeton Athletics.

As he wrote that, TB realized that if he hadn't spent all that time at Princeton then he probably wouldn't be a Princeton fan at all, since he went to Penn. Imagine the alternate universe where TB never started writing for the newspaper, went to law school instead and spent all these years as a tax attorney or something who was rooting for the Quakers on the weekends. Egads. 

Now he's starting to think of all the Princeton-Penn games he's been to in any sport where he would have had the opposite rooting interest. And now he's getting a headache.

Back here in the real world, as opposed to the alternate universe, TigerBlog instead did some alternate research. 

When he mentioned yesterday that both Xaivian Lee and Caden Pierce were closing in on 1,000 career points, it got him wondering how many Princeton juniors had reached that milestone. And, additionally, had any two juniors done so in the same year? 

If you don't recall, Lee now has 955 career points, which is four more than fellow junior Caden Pierce. Princeton hosts Cornell this Saturday at 2, though asking them to get 45 and 49 in one game might be a lot. 

So how many Princeton men's basketball players have reached 1,000 points by the end of their junior years? The answer is six. 

This is a bit misleading, of course, in that there would probably have been others had freshmen been eligible before the mid 1970s. 

Who is on the list? There are two players who did so before freshmen eligibility. Can you guess their names? Yes, of course you can.

They're also the two players who have scored the most by the end of their junior seasons. That would be, shockingly, Bill Bradley, who had 1,618 points between his sophomore and junior seasons alone, and then Brian Taylor, who only played two varsity seasons and had 1,239 points. 

The next four? Any guesses? 

Okay, TB will tell you. Devin Cannady is in third place for points by the end of a junior season with 1,224. Next up are Ian Hummer (1,170), Kit Mueller (1,161) and Doug Davis (1,110).

Should Lee and Pierce maintain their averages for the first three Ivy League games, they'd reach the end of the regular season with 1,226 (Lee) and 1,130 (Pierce). Those are big numbers for teammates. 

Hummer and Davis were teammates too, though Hummer was a year ahead of Davis, so they didn't both get to 1,000 as juniors in the same class. 

By the way, there is something on the 1,000-point list that leaps out at TB. It involves Myles Stephens, who might be the most underrated Princeton player this century. Stephens was known mostly as a defensive player, right? He was the 2017 Ivy Defensive Player of the Year as a sophomore. 

You know how many points he scored? How about 1,346, which is 10th best all-time at Princeton. If you're wondering, he finished his junior year with 980 points.

Throw in what a clutch player he was (see the 2017 Ivy League tournament semifinal against Penn as exhibit A), and that's an amazingly underrated player, one of the best the program has ever seen.