To lead off the first men's basketball notebook in several weeks, we have the startling fact that in last Saturday's contest against Columbia, six Crimson cagers scored exactly four points.

Beside those six, two Cantabs hit for 10 points (Neil Phillips and Fred Schernecker), freshman Kevin Collins, a former JV player recently moved up to the varsity, was scoreless in his first varsity action, and David Lang netted five points.

The previous high this season for number of Crimson players scoring exactly four points in one game (I have no idea why I bothered to figure this out) was three in the Lehigh game last month.

Harvard (5-15 overall, 1-7 Ivy after being swept last weekend by Columbia and Cornell) shot 26.5 percent from the floor in the second half against the Lions in the process of allowing the visitors to blow open a 45-43 ballgame and cruise home to a 60-49 victory.

The 26.5 percent mark was the lowest single-half accuracy rate of the season for the cagers, barely eclipsing the 26.7 clip which the Crimson hit at in the first half of the New Hampshire game (which the Wildcats won in overtime, 65-62).

The two next worst shooting performances for a half by Harvard this year both came in the first half of games against Dartmouth: 28.1 percent in the first half of the first game at Hanover, N.H., and 29.0 percent in the second game a week ago in Cambridge.

Overall, Harvard made just 18 of 63 field goal attempts in Big Green first halves this season. Not that it means anything, but for the one Darmouth game last year I could find statistics on, the Crimson shot 56.5 percent in the first half.

In total, the cagers have had five half-shooting performances in the 20s, 10 in the 30s, 18 in the 40s, six in the 50s, and one in the 70s (against Brandeis in an 81-58 rout). Harvard is shooting 42 percent from the field this year, well below the 52.3 percent last year's Crimson averaged.

And speaking of last year....

There are obviously quite a few fundamental differences between last year's veteran team, which contained a number of proven all-Ivy performers and an experienced coach, and this year's largely freshman squad led by first-year coach Pete Roby.

Given that no one expected this year's unit to be anything like last year's 15-9 team, comparisons between the two squads aren't particularly relevant.

But several are quite interesting. Under Frank McLaughlin's iron-man regime last year, every starter averaged at least 34.9 minutes per game, and the most used sub--Kyle Dodson--averaged less than nine minutes of action per contest.

This year, however, freshman Phillips leads the team with 32 minutes per contest, and guard Mike Gielen, who recently broke into the starting line-up, was averaging over 21 minutes per game coming off the bench.

With six games remaining this year, the Crimson already has amassed 41 blocks and 152 steals. All of last year, Harvard registered 27 rejections and 116 take-aways.

Leading the cagers this year are Bill Mohler with 28 blocks and Keith Webster with 51 steals.