MEN’S BASKETBALL: After quick turnaround, Yale plays at Dartmouth Tuesday
Playing its third league game in five days, Yale travels to New Hampshire to face the sixth-place Big Green. Yale beat Dartmouth in New Haven earlier this month.
Tim Tai, Staff Photographer
Before last month, the Yale men’s basketball team had not played a midweek Ivy League game since 2005. With a trip to New Hampshire on Tuesday, it will play its third such conference contest this season — and its third game in five days.
A Tuesday night meeting with Dartmouth (7–15, 4–7 Ivy), rescheduled from Jan. 7 because of an early January COVID-19 pause in the Yale program, gives the Bulldogs (15–10, 9–2) a quick chance to recover from their first loss in about a month. After beating Penn (12–13, 9–3) Friday, Yale fell to Princeton (19–5, 9–2), 81–75, at the John J. Lee Amphitheater on Saturday night.
Now deep into its conference schedule, Yale plays Tuesday after a quick turnaround, but having already scouted and defeated the Big Green when they visited New Haven in early February makes the transition less daunting. Yale coaches and upperclassmen are largely familiar with Dartmouth’s personnel too. For example, Brendan Barry, the Big Green’s graduate-student guard and leading scorer, played his first game against the Bulldogs more than five years ago in February 2017.
“We’re very familiar with them,” Yale head coach James Jones said. “[Yale guard] Azar [Swain ’22] has played against Barry for four years now, so it’s nothing that we haven’t seen. We understand what they’re going to do — a lot of teams in our league play the same way. A lot of stuff that Princeton ran [Saturday], Dartmouth will be running on Tuesday.”
Dartmouth, which currently sits in sixth place, has lost 11 straight games to Yale. Its last win in the series was infamous: a final-second layup led Dartmouth to a March 2015 win over first-place Yale in the last game of the regular season. With the loss, Yale had to face — and lost to — Harvard in a one-game playoff to determine the Ivy League’s automatic bid to the NCAA Tournament.
The sting of that Dartmouth upset has eased in recent years with two trips to March Madness and three Ivy League titles since 2016.
“You ask yourself the question: if we would have won that game and we would have won the championship that year and gone to the tournament, how hungry would we have been the next year?” Jones reflected in early March 2020, after Yale won its most recent Ivy League championship with a win over Dartmouth in Hanover. “You don’t know those things. We had the same team coming back and the nucleus of that team anyway. It was a shame because that group of kids — Armani Cotton ’15, Javier Duren ’15, Matt Townsend ’15 — those guys, they missed out on that opportunity, so that was hurtful. But the fact that they helped build our program to where it is right now is something to feel really good about.”
If Yale hopes to secure a third consecutive Ivy League championship to cap this season, taking care of the Big Green Tuesday will be important, as Princeton and Yale are currently tied for first with three regular-season games to go. The men’s college basketball ratings site KenPom pegs the chance of a Yale win over Dartmouth at 54 percent.
For Yale, the Dartmouth contest follows a back-to-back of two tightly contested games the Elis split against the Ancient Eight’s other top teams. Guard and captain Jalen Gabbidon ’22 scored a career-high 32 points to open the weekend with a win over Penn, prancing to the rim in the first half before connecting on three-point attempts in the second.
“Some games I’ve turned the ball over a lot in the first half trying to force it a little bit when they’ve been in the gaps a lot,” Gabbidon said after Friday’s win. “Today I tried to come out and let the game come to me a little bit, and right away noticed that they were sticking shooters really hard and trying to limit our assists and so the lanes opened up. Guys on my team were encouraging me to attack the basket and take advantage of those opportunities.”
On Saturday, Yale and Princeton were tied 44 at halftime before the Tigers built a lead early after the break by funneling the ball to its 6-foot-8 forward, Tosan Evbuomwan. Yale came back later in the half but could not complete the final offensive push it needed, scoring only two field goals in the last eight minutes of the game.
Meanwhile, Dartmouth swept Columbia (4–20, 1–11) and Cornell (13–10, 5–7) last weekend to keep its Ivy Madness chances alive, though only by a thread. (Yale has already secured a berth in the conference’s four-team postseason tournament, the winner of which earns an automatic bid to March Madness). Cornell and Harvard (13–10, 5–6) are the main competitors for the fourth seed. The most recent projections by Ivy League men’s hoops statistician Luke Benz ’19 give Dartmouth just a 5.8 percent chance to make the Ivy Madness field.
Still, Dartmouth will have some postseason hope to compete for when it hosts Yale Tuesday.
“We still have a chance to make the Ivy tournament and that means a lot to the guys,” fifth-year forward Aaryn Rai told The Dartmouth last weekend. “We don’t want to let a chance like this slip away without giving it our best go … We know how good of a team Yale is historically, so we’ll need to play our best and buy in as a team to get it done on Tuesday.”
Jones said it will be the first time he has coached three Yale games in the span of five days, but Dartmouth is operating on the same schedule.
“Just like we had two games and now we have to play another one, they had two games and now they have to play another one as well,” Jones said. “It’s not like they’re at home resting for us to come see them. We’re gonna go up there and just try to play hard and play well for 40 minutes and come home with a [win].”
Yale has not missed Ivy Madness since its inception in 2017, while Dartmouth is yet to make its first appearance in the conference tournament.
