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Down 21 points multiple times during the second half, the Harvard men’s basketball team had rallied to take the lead in its late February contest with Cornell. The Crimson, which in earlier contests against Columbia, Vermont, and Dartmouth had proved adept at snatching defeat from the jaws of victory, looked to finally be flipping the script.
However, Cornell’s sublime freshman guard Matt Morgan had no interest in writing a different story. With 24 seconds to go, Morgan canned a deep three to tie the game at 74. A fan base that had seen its team outscored by 24 points in eight minutes erupted.
After the timeout, Harvard coach Tommy Amaker put the ball in the hands of his own rookie point guard, Tommy McCarthy. With ten seconds to go, the team’s two best players—junior Zena Edosomwan and senior Agunwa Okolie—turned into decoys, setting staggered screens at the top of the arc for the freshman. With their marks drawn to the three-point line, the hoop was unguarded and McCarthy took advantage, banking in a floater with 5.5 seconds to go to cap off a career-high 21-point effort and give Harvard its biggest win of the season.
“To be able to do that and do it on the road, that’s even more impressive,” Amaker said after the game. “I can’t tell you how proud I am...his point guard play, his savviness, winning basket, all the plays that he made for our team. He really grew up tonight right in front of our eyes.”
Taking the final shot was not supposed to be in the cards for McCarthy. With former Ivy League Rookie of the Year and three-year starter Siyani Chambers ’16-’17 returning, McCarthy was slated to battle for minutes with juniors Matt Fraschilla and Corbin Miller in the Harvard backcourt. A torn ACL—which led Chambers to drop out of school to retain his eligibility—changed everything, thrusting him into a starting role a year early.
The results were mixed—McCarthy was at times the team’s lead facilitator, at times its top scoring threat, and at times its innings-eater on a roster that lacked another true point guard. On the season, he averaged nearly 25 minutes a game and appeared in all but two of the team’s contests. While McCarthy averaged nearly nine points and four assists per game on 35.7 percent shooting from deep, he hit just over a third of his shots overall.
McCarthy was thrown into the fire from the get-go. While McGill and MIT provided some tune-up to begin the season, Providence and a matchup with likely top-seven pick Kris Dunn reminded McCarthy that he was no longer in the San Diego Section of the California Interscholastic Federation.
Squaring off with Dunn wasn’t the only thing to come from out of the Providence matchup, as another torn ACL, this one by Fraschilla, left McCarthy in the driver’s seat. Amaker was brutally honest about the load it placed on his freshman and the expectations that came with it.
“We are trying to rely on our veteran guys and not trying to put our young guys in places or positions where we are counting on them so much but our position is different with McCarthy,” Amaker said after a loss to Boston College. “This is a critical spot and he’s just a freshman...it is easier said than done for any player but particularly young players to be solid.”
From that point forward, he became an essential part of the team. He logged 30 minutes or more eight times throughout the course of the season—at first out of necessity, but eventually due to his improved play and leadership capabilities. In matchups with Providence, UMass, Kansas, BYU, and Oklahoma, the freshman squared off against some of the best guards in the nation. He shot 11-for-49 but gradually improved, registering three triples, five assists, and two turnovers in a narrow loss to Oklahoma. The play continued to improve throughout the season: In his final seven games, McCarthy turned the ball over just 16 times and posted double-digit scoring outputs three times, including the 21-point outburst at Cornell.
Although McCarthy missed the penultimate Ivy League weekend with a concussion, the Crimson went as McCarthy did down the stretch. In the freshman’s last four games of the season, Harvard went 3-1, with the only setback coming against Columbia. In those four contests, McCarthy averaged 14 points a game and made at least three field goals in each contest.
“At the beginning of the season, I came in a little tentative and nervous,” McCarthy reflected after the Columbia loss, in which he scored 17 points on six-of-10 shooting.
“But I am really starting to get the hang of things,” he continued. “I feel a lot more comfortable out on the court and I know what Coach Amaker wants from me.”
–Staff writer David Freed can be reached at david.freed@thecrimson.com.
–Staff writer Stephen J. Gleason can be reached at stephen.gleason@thecrimson.com.
