Although Ivy shooters have struggled mightily this season when they get a hand in their face, they have performed much better from the comfort of the free throw line.
While only Penn ranks in the top 100 Division I teams in field goal percentage, four Ivy teams crack that mark in free-throw shooting.
Dartmouth has the largest disparity, coming in at 283rd (out of the 326 Division I teams ranked) in the former category and 40th in the latter.
Harvard leads the league in free throw percentage, shooting 74.1 percent. This total puts the Crimson at 31st in the nation.
Penn -- the only team in the conference ranked higher from the field than from the line -- on the other hand, sits at 98th in field-goal shooting, but at 289th from the stripe, converting only 63.6 percent of its attempts.
Both Brown and Princeton rank in the bottom 10 in field goal percentage, at 319th and 322rd respectively.
Two Ivy players rank in the top 10 in the nation in free throw shooting percentage. Harvard's Jim Goffredo has made 35-of-38 for 92.1 percent, which puts him at seventh among Division I players.
Yale sophomore forward Caleb Holmes ranks tenth, having converted 42 of 46 shots for 91.3 percent. Holmes ranks first in the nation among both sophomores and forwards.
Deceiving statistics
Even though Princeton is fourth in the country in scoring defense, allowing opponents only 55.4 points points per game, the Tigers have slid to a .214 winning percentage midway through the season.
This improbability stems from the fact that the Princeton offense slows games down significantly enough to make every game an extremely low-scoring affair, artificially inflating the team's defensive numbers.
To get a more accurate picture of Princeton's defensive abilities, it's useful to look at some alternative rankings.
Ken Pomeroy's well-known basketball statistics Web site calculates efficiency based on the number of points a team scores or allows per 100 possessions, removing the tempo at which a team plays as a factor.
Princeton manages only 56 possessions per 40 minutes, which is the lowest in the country. Because of the slow-paced game they play, the Tigers have a defensive efficiency ranking in the middle of the pack at 219th out of 334 Division I teams -- much less impressive than its No. 4 ranking.
On the other side of the ball, the Tigers are dead-last among ranked teams in scoring offense, netting a lowly 45.8 points per game.
In contrast to their defense, the Tigers' offensive numbers barely rise when efficiency is examined, moving them up just 10 spots to a ranking of 324th.
According to the traditional numbers, Princeton has a top-10 defense and a bottom-10 offense. Only the latter, however, truly illustrates their current situation.
