just a week ago, allgame insiders were exchanging giddy emails with subject lines like “break up the lions” that extolled the feisty play of rosenberg, osetkowski et al during a turn of the new year winning streak. but play on the road is tough in the ivies and today we find ourselves brushing the debris of minor metropolitan areas from our shoulders while trying to fathom defeats at the hands of brown and yale. though the outcomes were similar, the games were quite different in character. we hope the following sketches catch some sense of how different two losses can feel.
coach smith and his various charges have defeated the elis but once during his tenure and never yet in new haven. this past friday might have been the ugliest of all those encounters as the zebras presiding managed to whistle up 58 fouls in 40 minutes of play. i avoided mathematics while an undergraduate but those numbers do approximate one and a half fouls each and every minute of the game. it must have been an epitome of what many coaches dreaded before the season tipped off with new regulations concerning the proprieties of defense. although the lions were cited for a mere 4 more personals than their hosts, those calls sent the bulldogs to the charity stripe for 47 tosses while our boys in blue were granted but 34. not a small number, by ordinary standards, but few enough to insure that the lions had no chance of winning the game. since columbia was cashing their free throws at 81.8%, equal opportunity would have resulted in some 11 additional points for the visitors. just enough to undo the actual 69 -59 yale victory. the refs primary purpose is to ensure an even gymnasium floor for a contest, and no doubt the dimly illumined, vaguely rank, confines of yale’s ancient payne whitney facility made the officials’ task challenging. whatever their difficulties, they seem to have simply thrown in the towel on the last friday in january by handing all important benefits of their doubts to the home team. adding insult as well as injury were the three technicals assessed to grant mullins, noah springwater and the ordinarily laid back luke petrasek. we have little else to say about the ten point loss except that we heartily look forward to the bulldogs visit to harlem in a month.
happily, paulie b avoided that plodding connecticut affair. we found ourselves, instead, at the compact but charming pizzitola athletic center in providence where we settled in behind columbia’s bench for a tangle with a brown crew headed by the tough mike martin. purportedly the fourth youngest div i head coach, martin has yet to lose to the comparatively gray bearded coach smith. skippers aside, if you were to tell me, or any informed follower of ivy league play, that the lions would hold brown’s scoring leader, sean mcgonagill, to 10 points ( 2 of which came with less than two seconds to play) – well below his average, and still fall 64 -56, you’d hear “no way.” “way,” you could confidently reply because though the lions relentlessly pursued, dutifully denied the ball, and generally made sure that the broad chested, 6′ 1″ senior took no shot uncontested, mcgonagill still led his gang to victory. he was a model of perpetual motion and made sure that the quartet of guards charged with chasing him ran into dozens of screens on the way. denied his usual portion of points, he competently dished three assists, grabbed five boards and snagged a steal. mcgonagill was at his feistiest late in the second half when driving the lane. fouled emphatically, but not maliciously, by big cory osetkowski the brown guard bounced off the floor and pushed his nose well into the californian’s sternum. refs and a contigent of players from both teams managed to detach mcgonagill from osetkowski. the bruin calmly drilled the two free throws while continuing to express his contempt for the center’s forearm to the brow. no dishonor or too much disappointment losing to a kid like that. the main beneficiary of columbia’s focus on brown’s brightest star was mcgonagill’s teammate rafael maia who scored 18 points while also pulling in a dozen boards. maia was at his best at crucial moments and made sure that columbia could not close the two possession edge that the home team held for the game’s last five minutes. the lions did not help themselves when it mattered most at the foul line and uncharacteristically squandered four points. those missed tosses proved crucial as the game wound down and the bruins refused to yield their slight but sufficient advantage.
more worrying than the missed free throws in the lions second straight loss was their ineffective three point shooting. admittedly, they have not been brilliant from beyond the arc in any of their four ivy contests to date but in providence they seemed downright tentative out there. no one was just catching and shooting the ball. or shaking a defender and shooting the ball, for that matter. every hoisted trey seemed to be an occasion for ponderous reflection. this team is pretty quick and likes getting to the rim, but those clusters of points in the paint must be balanced by barrages from the outside. when both parts of the lion attack click, they are one tough out. mullins, lo, rosenberg, lyles and petrasek have all got to get a bit more aggressive on the outside. they could use some of steve frankoski’s unselfconscious willingness to hoist the trey. now, of course, part of columbia’s woe in this regard is that pretty much everyone in the ivies hotly contests perimeter shots. more reason to work harder to make them.
we travel to pretentious princeton this friday and hope that the boys will bounce back from their doubly disappointing trip north. surprisingly, the tigers are 0 – 3 in league play to date and will ferociously defend venerable jadwin. a bounce back win there will indicate a lot about the fortitude of this young, and recently humbled, lion crew.
peace out and d up,
paulie b