The most persistent question now facing the Crimson basketball squad is how many games a team can win if it has only one scorer of note, consistently sloppy ball-handling, and almost no rebounding at off.
Add to this gloomy picture the fact that heralded sophomores Denny Lynch and Pete Kelley have not been helping very much, back-court man Joe Dooring has an injured leg, and Gene Augustine still is playing with a cumbersome cast on his arm and the state of Harvard basketball is not nearly as secure as its 6-4 record would indicate.
Actually, the big surprise is that the Crimson has not lost more games. It managed to best Bowdoin, Brandeis, MIT, and Tufts while playing badly, but the well-balanced Ivy League will not provide any automatic victories this year.
In addition to the Crimson's loss to Dartmouth, opening Ivy games saw favorite Princeton topple Columbia, Yale upset Brown, and Cornell, an 11-point loser to the crimson in the Downeast Classic, defeat highly-regarded Pennsylvania. These results mainly presage a tight race for second place behind Princeton, but they also indicate that the Crimson will be pressed to avoid the eighth-place finish pre-season polls predicted.
Coach Floyd Wilson's crew will play again tomorrow at Brown. Despite the absence of all-Ivy backcourt man Mike Cingiser, the Bruine are just 2-3 for the season. However, one of their victories is over Boston College, an easy winner when they played Harvard.
Besides the 6 ft., 4 in. Cingiser who is averaging 18 points per game, Brown starts Gone Barth, 6 ft. 7 in. sophomore and captain Forest Broman at forwards, and 6ft. 5in. Greg Health at center. The fifth man will be either Dave Remington or Bill Oellrich.
However, there is still hope for the Crimson. In the Dartmouth game hot-shooting Gary Borchard kept the score close for 30 minutes, but the Indians' height advantage began to wear down the Crimson, and they pulled away in the final ten minutes.
If Borchard can get some scoring help from Bob Bowditch, Lynch, and Kelley, and someone besides sophomore Vern Strand can get some rebounds, there is still a chance for the varsity to finish is the first division.
But if rival defenses stop Borchard, as Dartmouth did in the second half, if Lynch continues to miss easy shots and fails to rebound, if Kelley can't learn the offensive patterns and remains on the bench, if Deering still throws the ball away and Augustine has to have his cast on for another month, and if Bowditch doesn't regain his shooting eye, it could be a long winter on the bottom of the Ivy League.
The team has shown flashes of talent, however, and it would be unwise to condemn it to the cellar before they do it themselves.
