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With two of its best playmakers looking on from the bench, the Harvard men’s basketball team (6-8) lost its first game of the new year, 65-62, to visiting Vermont (8-7). The Crimson turned the ball over 17 times, leading to 23 Catamount points, and never led in the second half.

TURNOVERS, TURNOVERS

The Crimson started the game quickly, taking a 4-0 lead in less than a minute on two assisted baskets. Passing the ball well, Harvard looked like the team that had 22 assists on 30 field goals against Wofford, not the unit that averages 15 turnovers a contest.

Regression to the mean was swift.

After a series of crisp passes led to a wide-open freshman Corey Johnson three-point attempt on the next possession, junior Zena Edosomwan turned the ball over on consecutive possessions. In the next time five minutes, the Crimson had five giveaways and no points.

“We kind of got the confidence that we can play with anybody and today we just didn’t do a good job of execution,” Edosomwan said.

The situation worsened when freshman Tommy McCarthy exited the game with an apparent injury after seven minutes. McCarthy, who played just seven minutes and missed his only two field goals, would not return for the rest of the game. After the game, Harvard coach Tommy Amaker said that he didn’t know what his point guard’s status would be moving forward.

Joining McCarthy on the bench was senior Patrick Steeves, who did not dress for the game after playing 25 minutes in the team’s last contest. The duo are not only the top two distributors for the Crimson, averaging a combined 6.6 assists per game, but also two of the team’s best three-point shooters.

Without their two top passers, the team finished with five fewer assists than turnovers. Senior Evan Cummins and sophomore Andre Chatfield were the only players to finish with more assists than turnovers, as Edosomwan and senior Agunwa Okolie combined for seven turnovers against just one assist.

“Pat’s a huge asset and honestly he’s made such a big difference in our turnaround,” Edosomwan said. “He comes off the bench and there’s so many things he can do. We lost Tommy pretty early in the first half so that was also tough but at the same time we’re the type of team where we don’t make excuses.”

STEPPING IN, STEPPING UP

With McCarthy on the bench, Amaker turned to junior backup Corbin Miller. The steady upperclassman kept the team in the game with five treys, none bigger than his triple with 1:41 to go that cut the lead to three. Miller’s 15 points were his second-highest effort of a season and good for second on the team.

Miller and backcourt running mate Johnson barely sat in the second half with McCarthy out and Cummins and Edosomwan in constant foul trouble. Johnson, Miller, and Okolie—who combined for 45 of the team’s 62 points—sat for a combined five minutes in the second half.

Okolie in particular was more aggressive to compensate for the team’s loss of spacing. The senior took 11 shots, nearly twice his season average, including seven in the second half. He had two blocks, two steals, and three rebounds in playing the entire final period.

“We need him to rebound and we needed so much more out of him today from an offensive standpoint, given the way we’ve been played,” Amaker said. “He didn’t shoot as well as we would’ve liked from the foul line, but he got there eight times and that’s what we need from an active, athletic player.”

Despite the absences, however, after the game, Amaker, noting his disappointment, said that he was unwilling to chalk up the loss to adverse circumstances.

“I’m sure there are a lot of factors that played into why we played the way we played,” Amaker said. “… You gotta figure it out and keep going. They played better than we did and deserved to win and we didn’t.”

—Staff writer David Freed can be reached at david.freed@thecrimson.com. Follow him on Twitter@CrimsonDPFreed.