Marisa Peryer, Staff Photographer

More than two years after the team cut down the nets at the John J. Lee Amphitheater on Selection Sunday in March 2019, Yale men’s basketball is still the reigning Ivy Madness champion.

Yale’s 97–85 victory over Harvard that afternoon earned the team a trip to March Madness as the winner of the Ivy League’s postseason tournament. But before the Blue and White tuned into CBS that evening to learn about their matchup — Yale, a No. 14 seed, ended up drawing No. 3 LSU — players, coaches, family and friends celebrated on the JLA hardwood, posing in championship T-shirts alongside a golden Ivy League trophy. 

The postseason win in New Haven remains a highlight of the program’s last four years — especially after COVID-19 caused abrupt cancellations of Ivy Madness and the NCAA Tournament in 2020, ending what could have been a promising run for Yale’s 2019–20 team before it even started. 

“There’s just so much going through my mind and my body after what we accomplished,” head coach James Jones, still clutching a game net, said at his press conference after the 2019 Ivy Madness championship game. “There’s 351 Division I basketball teams, and they all want to be in the position that we’re in. It’s a coveted spot. It’s just an unbelievable feeling.”

Under Jones, Yale had been in that spot once before. In 2016, one year before the Ancient Eight launched its four-team postseason basketball tournament at Penn’s Palestra, the Bulldogs took the conference’s regular-season title with a 13–1 league record. Yale won the program’s first NCAA Tournament game, upsetting No. 5 Baylor as a twelve seed. A seven-point loss to Duke in the next round prevented the Bulldogs from moving to the Sweet 16, but their historic tournament win left several underclassmen on that team — including forward Blake Reynolds ’19 and guard Trey Phills ’19,  who both made appearances off the bench in the March Madness games — eager to return.

Consecutive losses at Ivy Madness — to Princeton in the 2017 championship and to Penn in the 2018 semifinal — along with a roster that never reached full health kept the Bulldogs away for two years. Makai Mason ’18, the star guard who helped spearhead Yale’s 2016 tournament win with 31 points against Baylor as a sophomore, played only 21 minutes over the last two years of his Yale career; he suffered a broken bone and dislocated toe in a closed scrimmage against Boston University before the 2016–17 campaign and reaggravated the injury with a stress fracture on the eve of his senior season. Meanwhile, forward Jordan Bruner ’20 missed the 2017–18 season with a torn meniscus, an injury also sustained during a preseason scrimmage. 

“Given the last-minute injuries we’ve been faced with, I think we were trying to get a feel for the new rotations and see what works,” Phills said after Yale’s first two games of the 2017–18 season. “I think what’s most important to learn from and moving forward is that we can’t feel sorry for ourselves not being at full strength — we’ve got to maintain our identity of being a team that defends, rebounds and shares the ball.”

Still, by the end of the year, the Elis had managed a 9–5 conference record — good for third place in the regular season standings, the program’s sixth consecutive top-three finish. Guard Miye Oni cemented his status as the team’s offensive leader, finishing his sophomore year with 15.1 points and 3.6 assists a game and a unanimous selection to the All-Ivy First Team. Bruner’s injury also opened up room for then-first-year forward Paul Atkinson ’21 in the front court. Atkinson started 30 games as a rookie and set a school record — which he broke again a year later — with a field goal percentage of 69.2.

Yale returned its entire starting lineup heading into 2018–19: Bruner replaced Atkinson in the starting five, which also featured Oni, Phills, Reynolds and guard Alex Copeland ’19. Atkinson and guard Azar Swain ’22 rounded out the rotation, each averaging about 20 minutes a game.

In what would be his final season at Yale, Oni impacted every facet of the game. He finished the regular season averaging 17.4 points, 6.3 rebounds, 3.6 assists and 1.3 blocks per game on 44 percent shooting, drawing NBA scouts to New Haven and Yale’s road games along the way to Ivy League Player of the Year honors. Copeland joined him on the All-Ivy First Team. Both entered the program’s 1,000-point club in early 2019. 

“[I] definitely worked hard in the offseason,  but I didn’t do anything differently,” Copeland said before JLA hosted Ivy Madness that March. Yale, a No. 2 seed at the tournament, shared the regular season title with No. 1 Harvard, but fell to the Crimson in both regular-season meetings. “I think it’s really just a testament to the confidence that my teammates have given me and the coaching staff. It being my senior year, I think I’ve taken a bit of an effort to try to be more present and to try to play every game like it’s my last one.”

Copeland earned the Most Outstanding Player award at Ivy Madness, scoring 25 points to take down No. 1 Harvard. He also led Yale with 24 points against LSU in the first round of the NCAA Tournament, though the Bulldogs fell a few key shots short, dropping the game 79–74 after converting only eight of their first 37 three-point attempts.

Yale was without four starters heading into the 2019–20 season. Copeland, Reynolds and Phills all graduated, while Oni declared for the 2019 NBA Draft and left Yale after his junior season with plans to complete his degree later — he became the first Ivy Leaguer selected in the draft since 1995 and the first Yale player picked in more than three decades. He has played 54 games in his second year with the Utah Jazz, who begin the playoffs with the NBA’s best record.

Swain and Atkinson seamlessly entered the starting lineup to fill the gap left by the departure of Yale’s four veterans. Bruner continued to own the frontcourt, while guards Eric Monroe ’20 and Jalen Gabbidon ’22 both earned significant increases in playing time. Picked to finish third in the Ivy League’s preseason poll, Yale collected a school-record 12 nonconference wins, establishing itself as the league favorite heading into 2020. Bruner recorded the program’s first triple-double in a game at Cornell, Swain set a new record for three-pointers in a season and the Bulldogs swept the major Ivy League awards in March — Atkinson took co-Ivy League Player of the Year, Gabbidon earned co-Defensive Player of the Year and Jones won his third-career Ivy League Coach of the Year award.

“I thought last year was great and it was wonderful, and in a lot of ways, this year was better,” Jones said. “This season, in terms of leaving what you lost and being able to come together, we had one game all year that we didn’t have a chance to [win] in terms of the way we played. One game. All year. That’s a rarity.”

The one game — a 14-point loss to Harvard to end the regular season — fell a night after the Elis secured an outright Ivy League title and a No. 1 Ivy Madness seed with a win at Dartmouth. No one expected the double-digit loss would be the team’s last game of the season — or the last until the fall of 2021. But over the course of that next week in March, Yale players went from focusing on how two wins at Ivy Madness would catapult them back to the NCAA Tournament to going into lockdown and quarantine at home. Ivy League presidents canceled the conference tournament, and the NCAA officially called off March Madness about 48 hours later.

About two-thirds of Yale’s returners took leaves of absence during the 2020–21 year, as the Ivy League was the only Division I conference to cancel its basketball season due to COVID-19.

Atkinson, whose career field goal percentage of 66.1 percent ranks the best in Yale history, is set to play as a graduate transfer at Notre Dame next year.