“We’ve got to do a better job of taking care of the basketball,” Amaker said. “We’ve at times had games where we’ve had way too many turnovers. We’re going to have some because we play fast and we want to get up and down...but we’ve got to eliminate the silly stuff.”

That will be especially true at the FedEx Forum, where the Tigers ranked 11th in the country with an average of 16,000-plus fans per game last season.

“Memphis basketball is very important to that community [and] they support that program very well,” Amaker said. “We can’t just have poor offensive possessions [that] allow them to transition the ball up the floor and do some things that are very exciting for their home crowd [in] a very tough place to play.”

In Harvard’s two near misses at road upsets this season—a 67-64 loss at UMass and a 70-69 loss at St. Mary’s—crucial turnovers in the final seconds by Saunders and Rivard, respectively, helped cost the Crimson a pair of wins.

But Amaker says his team’s performances in those types of hostile environments show it can handle the pressures of the road.

“We can look back on some teams we’ve played, whether it’s a Cal-Berkley, UMass, [or] UConn [that have] similar kinds of players with great athletic ability, and draw from those experiences,” Amaker said. “Some of the places that we’ve already been in will allow us, at some comfort level, to adjust to that sort of environment.”

Despite the imposing presence of the arena and its home team, the coach said that he just wants his team to play the same way it has all year.

“We may not be able to pressure them as much [as we do other teams],” Amaker said. “We may just try to pull it back and contain them a little bit, but for the most part we’re going to be who we’ve been and see [if] we can take this challenge head-on.”

—Staff writer Scott A. Sherman can be reached at ssherman13@college.harvard.edu.