Captain Andrew Gellert stripped an opponent for the last time. Senior center Tim Coleman grabbed his final rebound. With a 92-83 loss to Brown on Saturday night, the Harvard men’s basketball team’s season—and Gellert’s and Coleman’s careers—came to a close.
The loss came on the heels of a 77-72 defeat at Yale on Friday, and dropped the Crimson (14-12, 7-7) to fifth place in the final Ivy standings.
“We really came out with a lot of intensity for Drew and Tim,” junior guard Brady Merchant said. “We felt they should go out with some wins.”
Coleman’s final weekend in a Crimson uniform was a big one. He followed up a 15-point, eight-rebound effort against the Elis by leading all scorers in the Brown game with 20 points. Coleman also posted a team-high nine rebounds against the Bears.
Gellert had a quieter career-capping weekend, but according to teammates, that’s what makes him special.
“Drew will be really hard to replace,” junior forward Sam Winter said. “He’s such a great defender, and he’ such a great leader. It’ll be harder to make up for that than the tangible things like steals and scoring.”
It was the fourth consecutive season that Harvard finished with a 7-7 league mark.
Brown 92, Harvard 83
Led by freshman guard Jason Forte’s 17-point performance, the Bears (17-10, 8-6) tied the school record for most wins in a season and clinched sole possession of fourth place in the Ivy League standings in front of 1,573 at the Pizzitola Sports Center on Saturday.
The Crimson went on a 12-3 second-half run to pull the score to 80-76 with just over two minutes remaining in the game, but Brown stepped it up down the stretch. The Bears sunk seven-of-eight free throws in the final two minutes to ice the victory.
“We felt confident that we could make a run on them at the end of the game especially because we had jumped out so early in the game,” Merchant said.
After racing to an early 10-2 lead, Harvard controlled the game for the majority of the first half. A pair of three-pointers from junior guard Patrick Harvey gave the Crimson a 34-28 lead with five minutes to play in the first half, but the Bears seized the momentum, going on a 18-6 run to enter the half with a 46-40 lead.
Harvey and junior point guard Elliott Prasse-Freeman finished the game with 17 points each, while Coleman posted 20. It was just the fourth time this season that Harvey did not lead Harvard in scoring.
Junior forward Earl Hunt added 16 points for the Bears, with 12 points coming on 4-of-4 shooting from behind the arc. Senior forward Shaun Etheridge, playing in his final game, scored all 12 of his points in the second half for Brown.
The only other time that the Bears posted 17 wins in a season was 1985-1986, the year that Brown won its only Ivy League title.
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