Even when the Crimson did get into its half-court offense, it couldn’t score from the perimeter. Rogus—the team’s leading scorer—went 0-for-8 from the floor, missing all seven of his three-pointers and scoring just two points. He appeared to be hampered by a nagging leg injury.

“In the first half, what we tried to do was take away his touches,” Jones said. “In the second half, we played it more straight up because we thought we were getting spread out.”

“[Rogus] had a tough night,” Sullivan said. “He was guarded hard. He’s really trying to tough the whole thing out. I don’t know that he has the same mobility.”

“Kevin’s resiliency and his toughness have really been the soul of a lot of our team effort this year, but I know he’s laboring with this,” Sullivan added.

Junior captain and small forward Jason Norman added a 3-for-9 performance—0-for-4 from behind the arc—as Harvard hit just two of its 16 three-point attempts.

The short-staffed Crimson frontcourt, then, surprisingly wasn’t the problem. In fact, led by Stehle, Harvard’s big men managed to more than hold their own. It was just that the Crimson’s backcourt came up a little too small.

—Staff writer Alan G. Ginsberg can be reached at aginsber@fas.harvard.edu.