Big Red Heroics Send Crimson to Sixth Straight Loss

It would be an understatement to say that things haven’t gone well for the Harvard men’s basketball team this season. Losers of six straight in the Ivy League, the Crimson returned home on Friday against Cornell as a collection of bruised and battered souls.

Having suffered through a five-game road stretch that saw no victories but plenty of misery, the sight of the Big Red (15-5, 7-0) rolling to town promised more of the same for the Harvard faithful. Heartbreak was in order for the struggling Crimson (6-17, 1-6 Ivy), which dropped a nail-biter, 72-71, in the final seconds.

Consider this scene at Lavietes on Friday. Sophomore Jeremy Lin, trying to take his man off the dribble realizes the space his defender is allowing and pulls up for a clutch three pointer. Harvard leads, 71-66, with 31 seconds to go.

The crowd at Lavietes reaches decibel levels that haven’t been heard since the Michigan game. The bottom dwellers of the Ivy are less than a minute away from pulling off the biggest upset over the top dog in the conference.

Unfortunately for the Crimson, this is the moment where the script turns sour. After a timeout, Cornell’s Alex Tyler takes the game in his hands. He pulls down the offensive board and forces junior Evan Harris into a goaltending violation.

Seconds later, a turnover by Lin leads to another Cornell breakaway and easy two. Harvard sits precariously on a one-point lead with nine seconds remaining. As the common phrase goes, this is where the wheels came off.

“I just thought on the inbounds play they ran we just fell asleep on the backside of our defense,” head coach Tommy Amaker said.

The Big Red inbounds the ball with nine ticks remaining. With no one guarding the middle, Tyler once again is allowed an uncontested layup. The basket gives Cornell its first lead since the 17:30 mark of the second half. The play drains seven seconds off the clock. Harvard, with no time to draft a play, let alone create a decent shot, collapses at the buzzer with no answer to Tyler’s six straight points.

“It’s a really disappointing result for us because we played so well against the first place team, one of the hottest teams in the nation,” Amaker said. “I feel we performed well to put ourselves in position to win the game but couldn’t break them down at the end.”

After shooting 39 percent from the floor in the first half, the Crimson came out reloaded in the second. Riding the guns of Lin and junior Drew Housman, Harvard shot 50 percent from the floor, including 50 percent from the three-point arc.

Housman led the team with 18 points, including two threes and perfection from the charity stripe. Lin added 15 with four steals.

“We played more confidently and came out with an edge about us,” Housman said. “We’ve been coming out flat [during the season] and I think today people were thinking from the get-go that we could win this game outright instead of having to build a comeback.”

Harvard amassed a 10-point lead with 7:35 to go, but costly turnovers and domination on the boards allowed Cornell to creep back in. Collectively, the Big Red pulled down 35 boards, including nine offensive rebounds. Tyler, shooting 9-of-11 from the floor, achieved a double double with 19 points and 10 boards.

The Crimson paled in comparison, as no one achieved double digits in rebounds. As a team, Harvard could only muster five offensive boards and 23 total rebounds.

“We haven’t been very good in the interior all season,” Amaker said. “An area of concern is our ability to dig in, get a stop, and get defensive rebounds.”

If any positives could be taken away from the game, one could point towards the Crimson’s staunch defense of the perimeter throughout the game. Although Harvard had no answer for Cornell’s Ryan Wittman—who led all scorers with 20 points—most of his baskets came on fast breaks or drives into the post.

The Big Red went 2-of-13 from three-point land, hardly up to the caliber of the No. 1 team in the conference. However, after only having one layup in the first, Cornell turned up the interior intensity, punishing the Crimson with six layups and three jumpers in the paint.

As the wear-and-tear of a tumultuous season continues to weigh down Harvard, the prospect of playing on back-to-back nights against the two hottest teams in the conference—the men played Columbia on Saturday night—never seemed like an easy task.

“Everything we’ve worked on, we didn’t execute when we needed to,” Lin said.

Although the Crimson proved it can certainly run with the big boys, there’s a world of difference between playing competitively in big games and closing out big games. All signs now point toward the future, as the men look to build on the positives and reverse the seven-game slide in conference play.

—Staff writer Mauricio A. Cruz can be reached at cruz2@fas.harvard.edu