HARVARDDADGRAD
Postdoc
Posts: 2692
Loc: New Jersey
Reg: 01-21-14
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01-18-22 12:50 PM - Post#333664
In response to digamma
Thanks for highlighting the second half. Too many times Dartmouth has made halftime adjustments at Hanover and pulled out a victory. Big Green outscored Harvard 28-21 in the second half despite only making 6 shots from the field, including 1-15 on 3's. I recall that too many of those were wide open.
As I said, we were lucky not to be swept this weekend. Our short rotation included Evan Nelson playing significant minutes (23 and 13) in his first two collegiate games. Hemmings and Simon look somewhat lost out there in their first games as well. To think that we're winning with Kirkwood, Catchings, Sakota, Wojcik, Lesmond and Silverstein is incredible.
Against Columbia, I believe we only won because Columbia was missing key players as well. Freshmen played 112 our of our 180 minutes. Our 3 non-freshmen (Kirkwood, Sakota and Catchings) scored 60 of our 91 points.
Against Dartmouth freshmen played 87 minutes and those same non-freshmen scored 39 of 60 points.
Our short bench shows. Against Columbia a 15 point lead was trimmed to 7 in the closing minutes and Dartmouth similarly reduced a 13 point deficit to a single point. Our scoring and shooting remained strong in the second half against Columbia, but dropped off significantly in the second half at Dartmouth.
I hope we see Ledlum, Forbes, Tretout and/or Freedman in next weekend's single game at Cornell. It doesn't seem that Ajogbor or Pitcher are close. If the Big Red revert to OOC form, they could push the action for 40 minutes and press full court. Fortunately, this is not the tail end of a back to back weekend, but rather just a single game.
We follow that up with a single home game weekend against Penn on January 28th. I'd consider us very fortunate to be 3-2 (give or take a game), given the decimated roster and having played 3 road contests.
On the other hand, if we're not relatively healthy following that Penn game, we're in trouble with 3 games in 6 days at Brown and vs Yale (2x).
Sooner or later, we have to get healthy. We won't be totally healthy, but we need Ledlum and Forbes.
Edited by HARVARDDADGRAD on 01-18-22 12:52 PM. Reason for edit: No reason given.
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