The Ivy League men's basketball season starts in earnest this weekend, and there are a few issues worth noting.
While the League may have eight teams, the well-informed fan should really only acknowledge the existence of five. You can forget about Columbia, Brown and Yale. Those three teams finished at the bottom of the League last season and each lost its best player to graduation and will be hard pressed to improve upon their earlier dismal efforts. Already the Terrible Three have the worst out-of-conference records among Ivy teams.
At the top of the Ancient Eight are perennial powerhouses Penn and Princeton, collective winners of 36 of the last 40 Ivy titles, who are once again favored to finish atop the standings. The Quakers, who finished undefeated in League play last season and even received an 11 seed in the NCAA Tournament, return a stellar backcourt and a solid supporting cast. Their only major loss, All-Ivy forward Paul Romanczuk, has been ably replaced by younger players.
Penn's star point guard -- with a superstar name -- Michael Jordan is one of two returning first team All-Ivy performers from a year ago. Shooting guard Matt Langel has made his mark from behind the three-point arc. He has hit over 43 percent of his trey tries this year.
Finally chasing Penn after three consecutive Ivy Championships from '96 to '98, Princeton enters Ivy competition still searching for replacements to its All-Ivy defections. 1998 Ivy League Player of the Year, shooting guard Brian Earl, has departed along with small forward Gabe Lewullis. Left over is dominating sophomore center Chris Young and a number of questions.
Mason Rocca, a mercurial forward through the past three years mostly spent on the Tiger bench, currently leads the team in scoring at 13 points a game. Highly-touted freshman guard Spencer Gloger, Earl's replacement, has of late helped pick up the scoring slack of his predecessor. Guards Ahmed El-Nokali, who last year took jump shots by starting the ball at his hip, C.J. Chapman, who was injured for part of last season, and freshman Eugene Baah comprise the remainder of the backcourt rotation. Up front, forward Nate Walton has averaged 5.3 points per game.
Before the season began, Penn was the League favorite and Princeton was considered a contender for an at-large bid to the NCAA Tournament -- a new concept for an Ivy team resulting from increased media coverage in recent years. Early-season performances have done nothing to dispel such predictions. Penn's record is 3-6, which includes a win over California and a seven-point loss to Auburn, one of the top five teams in the country. Princeton stands at 7-7, having defeated nationally-recognized College of Charleston and TCU while losing respectably to Missouri, Ohio and UNLV.
Does this mean Penn and Princeton's hegemony will be unchallenged? Well, not exactly.
Until last weekend, standing in third with a bullet were the Dartmouth Big Green. If not for the loss of sophomore small forward Charles Harris, a superb leaper, to academic difficulties, the Green might have been ranked aheard of Princeton in the pre-season polls. Even without Harris, Dartmouth returns four starters from its 10-4 Ivy season in 1999, including one player each from the first team, second team and honorable mention part of the All-Ivy roster.
Power forward Shaun Gee '00 returns for his second year as team captain. He led the Ivies in scoring as a sophomore to earn first team All-Ivy honors, which he repeated again last season. Hard-nosed shooting guard Greg Buth '01 won an award from the National Basketball Hall of Fame as the nation's top three-point shooter in 1999. Center Ian McGinnis '01, who runs the floor as well as any big man in the League, led the nation in rebounding last season.
Point guard Flinder Boyd '02 is the 12th-leading returning assist man in the country, despite playing all last year with a cast on his left hand. Even Harris' replacements, Mark Kissling '02 and Vedad Osmanovic '02, have game experience and special talents. Osmanovic on several occasions has taken over parts of games with offensive explosions.
Despite their star power, the Green have had a tough time in the early going. After a 48-43 loss to Harvard, the team is 4-8. That defeat follows an earlier loss to the Crimson 66-59 at Harvard on December 15. A year ago, Dartmouth was undefeated against every Ivy team save Penn and Princeton, who both swept the Green. Already Dartmouth has dug itself a hole it can only crawl out of by holding off further upsets and knocking off the Big Two.
The two teams hoping to move into the upper echelon of the Ivies, perhaps contending with Penn and Princeton in future years, Cornell and Harvard, pose bigger threats to Dartmouth than to the League favorites. Both have young point guards who direct their squads well. Big Red sophomore point man Wallace Prather is reminiscent of Harvard's graduated All-Ivy guard Tim Hill in his physical build and his calmness on the floor. Harvard's replacement for Hill, freshman Elliott Prasse-Freeman averages 6.7 assists per game and already seems integrated into the Crimson offense. Harvard's title hopes were dashed with the loss of its best player, forward Dan Clemente, to injury early in December. The team can still play spoiler, however, as it has already proven against Dartmouth.
Meanwhile Cornell has built confidence with a weak out-of-conference schedule, going 6-6 so far. Tough forward Ray Mercedes leads the Red at over 16 points a game and junior college transfer Greg Barratt scores 12.4 points a game at the other forward. Cornell is the only team besides Dartmouth with a real chance of dethroning Penn and Princeton this season, but they will likely suffer a similar fate as last season, when they were bogged down by losses to mediocre Ivy opponents and could never really get a "title shot."
Aside from the team competition is the intrigue of individual awards. It appears that Princeton's Gloger has the Freshman of the Year wrapped up already, which leaves league MVP as the most hotly contested prize. There are really only three players with a shot at this award. Princeton's Young is so good that he even scored 20 points in an 82-67 loss to national power Kansas. But Young is still very young and has been inconsistent.
Dartmouth's own Gee is definitely the best inside-outside player in the League. He combines a high scoring average with a rebounding average that has been among the top 10 in the Ivies two years running. Gee's fadeaway baseline jumper is unstoppable when he is on.
Nonetheless, the early favorite for the Player of the Year award has to be Jordan. He's the best player on the league's best team. While he may be a ball hog as a point guard, he still manages to dish five assists a game to go with his rising 15-point scoring average. Jordan makes a good Penn supporting cast better. He particularly helps gawky center Geoff Owens, in part because Jordan's numerous shots give the big man lots of opportunities for rebounds.
If you can't count on Michael Jordan, who can you count on?
