The occasion was the Tigers' Ivy League opener at the Palestra Saturday against a Penn team that had five straight en route to a 10-3 record. The Quakers had battled all the way back from looking like they might be blown out to the verge of pulling it out.
Ah, but TigerBlog had learned his lesson. Remember the George Mason game?
Well, this time TB never lost faith. He can honestly say that he never thought Princeton would lose. And in the end, the final was Princeton 74, Penn 68.
The Tigers finished the game with a 17-7 run, one that showed once again that this is a team that knows how to win. In doing so, Princeton extended its own winning streak to 11 while improving to 13-1 overall and running its winning streak against Penn to 15 straight.
It's not easy to do what Princeton did in that game. When you have an early double figure lead like that (it was 25-12 at one point) and then look up to see that you're down (for the record, it was a 12-2 Penn run to start the fourth quarter that left it 61-57 Quakers with 5:44 left.
Now Princeton had no momentum. It's margin for error was gone. Shots hadn't been falling like they had been.
In fact, Princeton missed its first seven field goal attempts in the fourth quarter and made only one of its first nine. And then the switch was flipped.
After falling behind by four, Princeton shot 5 for 8 for the rest of the game. Oh, and two of those misses? They were followed by offensive rebounds and second-chance makes.
What did the win make Carla Berube's regular-season Ivy League record as Tiger head coach? Is 66-5 good?
(Mental note: TigerBlog needs to remind Berube that she's promised him a karaoke duet at some point).
Once again, Princeton showed that it is more than a one-woman team. This time, it was Olivia Hutcherson's turn to lead the team in scoring, with a career-high 20, along with five rebounds, three assists, three steals and two blocks.
Madison St. Rose had 15 in the game, the fourth of which was her 1,000th career point, making her the 29th Tiger women's player to reach the milestone. It came on a jump shot from above the foul line in the first quarter.
St. Rose, as you probably know, played only four games last year as a junior before a knee injury ended that season. As such, she's reached 1,000 points in what is essentially 2.5 seasons. That's very impressive.
The women are at Yale this coming Saturday at 2.
The men? They're home tonight, also against Penn. Tip-off in Jadwin is 7.
For those who don't know this, the Princeton-Penn men's basketball rivalry is unlike any other in college basketball. Between 1963 and 2009, only three times did a team other than those two go to the NCAA tournament as the Ivy League champion.
There is no league that got only one bid that can make that claim. Not even close.
The Princeton-Penn men's basketball game is always special. TB has seen it for 45 years now, starting as a Penn student and continuing through his newspaper career and all his decades at Princeton. The game just always feels different.
It's the Ivy League opener for both as well. It's also the first Princeton-Penn game as a head coach for Fran McCaffery, a former Quaker point guard (extra credit if you know that he began his college career at Wake Forest).
He's also the reason that TB got into the newspaper business, and as such to Princeton, in the first place. TB has shared this story before; the gist is that he and McCaffery had a work-study job together in the psychology department basement, and it was through Fran that TB met Jack McCaffery, his older brother and a longtime sportswriter/columnist in the Philadelphia area. It was Jack who actually got TB his first writing job.
It'll be good to see Fran, and hopefully Jack will be in the building too. And then it will be time to root against them.
Tip off, as he said, is at 7.
No comments:
Post a Comment