“A big thing for us: at the end of the game, two of the starters that usually have not been on the floor at the end—Matt Stehle and Mike Beal—were both in there,” Harvard coach Frank Sullivan said. “Up at Dartmouth, [Stehle] lasted 17 minutes, but here he’s in at the end of the game, making his free throws.”
Getting Defensive
After giving up more than 80 points in six of its first 11 games this season, the Harvard defense has clamped down in the last three contests, allowing an average of 52.7 points per game and keeping its opponents under 40 percent shooting from the field.
“If we can keep opponents under 40 [percent], we’ll be able to hang in every game,” Sullivan said. “They were shooting under 40 in the first half and we were not playing well offensively. But we kept them under 40 for the game, found some offense ourselves and were O.K. to finish out the game.”
Holding Dartmouth to only 49 points would point to a strong defensive performance in itself. But 15 of those points were scored in the final 4:20 of the game—after Harvard had already seized control of the contest. In fact, the Crimson held the Big Green to just three field goals during a 12:28 span of the second half.
“Our mantra getting ready for this game was being tougher and guarding tougher,” Sullivan said.
The Crimson defense received a face-lift Saturday against Dartmouth. Sullivan implemented a full-court, man-to-man defense that he had planned to use in last week’s matchup with the Big Green, but he didn’t have the opportunity to deploy it extensively. On Saturday, Sullivan put the new defense into practice immediately after Dartmouth’s first basket.
“The full-court man defense isn’t designed to get steals; it’s just designed to take seven or eight seconds off the clock,” Stehle said. “It was more focused on letting them get it in and putting pressure so they can’t just run up, making it easier for us on defense.”
Rogus Toes the Line
The Crimson offense prospered on Saturday despite a lack of production from junior guard Kevin Rogus, Harvard’s leading scorer.
Rogus shot 1-for-10 with five points on the game while playing with a broken toe.
“[The broken toe] didn’t affect my shooting at all,” Rogus said. “When you play enough games, you realize you’re going to have games when you just can’t make a shot.”
Despite the injury, Rogus still managed to lead the team in minutes with 35 and pull down six rebounds, half of them on the offensive end.
“He had a very tough first half,” Sullivan said. “We just had to talk to him about fighting through it and he hung in there nicely.”
—Staff writer Michael R. James can be reached at mrjames@fas.harvard.edu.