YALE V. PENN
To those uninitiated in Ivy League basketball, I’d like to set straight a couple common misconceptions. First, Harvard isn’t the only school to recruit better in recent years; both teams here have one three-star recruit (and Penn has 14 two-stars) on the roster. Second, Armani Cotton is not the name of a Snooki-sponsored female clothing line—he’s a starting Bulldog forward. Finally, if the YDN does cover this game, you can read about it not on Saturday, but on Monday. I’ll take it a step further and pre-emptively ignore this game before it happens.
Pick: Yale
CORNELL V. DARTMOUTH
Cornell-Dartmouth is a lot like Freshman Formal: You don’t want to go and if you do, you won’t remember it the next morning.
Pick: Dartmouth
COLUMBIA V. HARVARD
The Lions’ trip to Harvard conjures up a familiar memory: the 2011 visit Penn—and stud Jewish point guard Zack Rosen ’12—made to Cambridge. Fresh off scoring the Quakers’ final 16 points a night earlier against Dartmouth, Rosen came alive late with Penn’s final nine in the Quakers’ 55-54 win in Lavietes to cut Harvard’s league lead to one heading into the season’s final weekend.
Junior Columbia forward Alex Rosenberg will come in and try to duplicate Rosen’s play to tear out the hearts of Crimson fans—and specifically, that of one Alexander L. Koenig—again. Per game, the former Maccabiah Games star averages 16 points, four rebounds, and—as a member of the tribe myself, I speculate with experience—three“Oy vey, he shoulda been a lawyer” cries from his mother.
Rosenberg will be heading into hostile territory—Harvard has won 47 of its last 51 contests at Lavietes—and, likely, a harder matchup. After co-captain Laurent Rivard was torched by Rosenberg for 34 points last time out, expect junior wing Wesley Saunders to get the call.
With Saunders on Rosenberg, Harvard will force the Lions’ secondary unit to excel. Sophomore Lions guard Grant Mullins may be the league’s most under-the-radar scorer, but he will have to shine in prime time to keep Columbia’s title hopes alive.
On the offensive end, Harvard will need more out of Saunders, who has seven single-digit scoring efforts this season after just one all of last year. The pesky Lions have played Harvard tough recently—two of the past five matchups have gone into overtime—but the Crimson has enough defensively to grind out a close win.
Pick: Harvard
—Staff writer David Freed can be reached at david.freed@thecrimson.com.