Four more things to know about Princeton's win over Harvard

1. Though Douglas Davis ’12 has been stellar in his three years at Princeton, the 2011 Ivy League season was not his best stretch. He made 39.1 percent of his field-goal attempts in Ivy games and averaged 10.3 points, both below his season averages. Last week, he was left off the list of All-Ivy honorees for the first time in his career. A few days later, he made the biggest shot of his life to beat Harvard at the buzzer.

 

“Because he’s been so good as a freshman and sophomore, I’m disappointed that he’s overlooked as a junior,” Princeton head coach Sydney Johnson ’97 said after the Harvard game. “He’s definitely one of the 15 or 14 best players in our league.”

 

2. The Princeton-Harvard tickets were allotted evenly between the two schools, with Tiger rooters taking the seats on the south half of Yale’s Payne Whitney Gymnasium. A 10-seat buffer separated the student sections, and about a half-hour before the game, the two sides showed a rare moment of cooperation: Princeton students chanted “Yale,” Harvard students replied with a five-letter verb. But the truce was short-lived. When the exchange dissipated, Crimson fans revived it with “Princeton” in place of “Yale.” Princeton students countered by referencing an oft-quoted Charlie Sheen line, chanting “Ti-ger-blood, Ti-ger-blood.”

 

3. Princeton has two seniors among its key contributors (Kareem Maddox ’11 and Dan Mavraides ’11), while Harvard had no seniors on its roster this year. Crimson head coach Tommy Amaker, asked whether his team’s relative youth played a role in the loss, noted that “our ‘youth’ got us the go-ahead basket.” Sophomore Brandyn Curry made the layup to put Harvard up 62-61. Instead, Amaker cited poor foul shooting and sub-par rebounding as key factors in his team’s defeat. Princeton had 14 offensive rebounds, while Harvard had five.

 

Rebounding traditionally has not been a strong area for Princeton, but Johnson noted that his staff has emphasized it this year.  “We don’t look like Princeton teams from the past, and there’s nothing wrong with that,” he said. “We definitely share the ball. We definitely need to play with heart. I think those are things that have run throughout the years. But … we do some different things, and I think offensive rebounding is part of it.”

 

4. Princeton will learn its NCAA Tournament opponent and destination tonight when the tournament selection show airs at 6 p.m. on CBS. The athletics department is hosting a selection show party for the campus community at the Frist Campus Center, beginning at 5:30 p.m. The Princeton women’s basketball team, also NCAA Tournament-bound, will receive its opponent and site Monday night.