“You look at Towns and Corey Johnson, different guys, we ordinarily need them to make shots for us and today was one of the days where we weren’t able to do it and the shooting percentages weren’t very good,” Amaker said.

The third meeting between the Ivy League’s biggest rivals bore little resemblance to the teams’ two February matchups. While the Crimson rode hot shooting to neutralize the Elis’ rebounding advantage earlier in the season, Harvard flipped the script at the Palestra. The Crimson won the rebounding battle and gathered 18 offensive boards. Despite its efforts on the glass, Harvard was rewarded with a mere 15 second chance points.

Oni was the key to opening up the Crimson on the other end. The freshman only averaged 8.5 points in the teams’ two prior meetings, during which Yale shot 43 percent. On Saturday, Oni had 18 and his team made nearly 48 percent of its shots.

Amaker often alludes to the fact that Harvard goes as Chambers goes. On Saturday, Chambers was not going and his non-Aiken teammates found themselves in similar shooting funks. While he only averaged 12 points against the Bulldogs going into the game, Chambers had been efficient, converting nine of his 19 tries. Chambers was 1-of-6 from the field in his 35 minutes of action on Saturday.

Towns entered Philadelphia having won three consecutive Ivy League Rookie of the Week honors. The Columbus, Ohio native struggled defensively and could not get in a rhythm on the other end, missing 13 of his 16 shots. He combined with Aiken for 40 points in the Crimson’s 77-64 win over the Bulldogs two weekends ago.

To make matters worse, Johnson was unable to snap out of his shooting slump. The Ottawa native missed Harvard’s two games against Columbia and Cornell over Presidents’ Day Weekend due to an illness and has not been the same since. Since Amaker replaced Johnson in the starting lineup with Aiken, Johnson has not been the knockdown three-point shooter that Crimson fans have come to know.

Before Feb. 24, Johnson was shooting 44.6 percent from long range in eight conference games. His 44.3 percent mark through 23 games would have put him eighth nationally in three-point field goal percentage had he maintained that clip. Instead, Johnson has converted just five of his last 20 three-point field goals, including none of his six long-range attempts on Saturday.

“Our shooting performance, our percentages were just awful,” Amaker said. “It’s going to be very hard to win a game like this, shooting the ball the way we did this afternoon.”

—Staff writer Stephen J. Gleason can be reached at stephen.gleason@thecrimson.com.