The Crimson's take on Harvard hoops

Earlier this week, a basketball writer from Harvard's student newspaper, The Crimson, asked if I could answer a few questions about the looming Penn-Harvard game for a feature on their sports blog The Back Page. After giving them my take, I turned his questions around and asked The Crimson's Martin Kessler to do the same. Here are his thoughts:

DP SPORTS: 1. What can Penn expect from Harvard on Friday?

Martin Kessler: For a team that has won games at such a consistent rate, it’s remarkable how inconsistent the Crimson’s offense has been. One night Harvard will post 74 points on 50.9 percent shooting against a team that holds opponents to 39.1 percent from the field. And then the very next game, the Crimson will miss 63.6 percent of its shots and score 54 points against a team that allows 70.5 points per game. But one constant for the Crimson has been its defense. Only three of Harvard’s 22 opponents have shot over 50 percent against the Crimson and 10 have been held to under 50 points.

 2. Who has been able to stop Kyle Casey and Keith Wright and what did they do?

One word: zone. It actually baffles me that more teams don’t just pack a zone against the Crimson. That’s what Fordham did, and it had tremendous success, limiting Wright and Casey to eight and nine points, respectively. Obviously the downside of a zone is that you give Harvard’s shooters—Laurent Rivard, Oliver McNally, Christian Webster, and Corbin Miller—some open looks. But the Crimson is known for its streaky shooting. So if Harvard is having an off shooting night against a team that stays in a 2-3 zone, the Crimson could lose to a lot of teams, especially one as talented as Penn.

 3. How is the campus reacting to your season? A good basketball team at Harvard is a new phenomenon, so are students getting into it?

We’re not at the Krzyzewskiville (Amakerville?) level yet, but people are starting to get into it. Games have been selling out, and the student section has been more than respectable. (This is partially because the undergraduate library, which is usually open 24 hours a day, closes on Friday and Saturday nights, and partially because people actually care about basketball).

4. Tom Brady or Gisele?

Too many painful memories to talk about this right now…

5. Do you see Harvard running the Ivy table this season?

6. When we met some Crimson sports writers in Cambridge for the football game this year, they took us to IHOP. Is that really the best brunch spot that side of Harvard Yard?

I would take Zoe’s any day of the week (their crunchy French toast and home fries are bomb), but IHOP is a Crimson tradition. Nothing beats a Big Steak Omelette at 2 a.m.

7. Jeremy Lin. Seriously? Did anybody see this coming?

I’ve been jocking Jeremy Lin for a good four years now, but if you had told me he would be the first player to score 28 points and hand out eight assists in his first NBA start since Isiah Thomas, I would have said you had been licking toads like Homer in “Missionary: Impossible.” That being said, Lin has always demonstrated an ability to bring his best when the odds are stacked against him. As a junior at Harvard he went up against Boston College’s Tyrese Rice and scored 27 points. One year later he dropped 30 on Jerome Dyson and Kemba Walker at UConn. Then at the NBA Summer League, he did this to John Wall.