Senior forward Andre Logan looks at the floor as he talks. He uses words not familiar around Princeton basketball, where often success seems to be a birthright.
“Miserable,” Logan, a Poly Prep grad, says of the past month. “It’s been terrible. Going into the season, I’d never thought we’d be in this position.”
For 51 straight seasons, Princeton finished .500 or better in conference play, including all 48 as members of the Ivy League.But entering the second half of the season, which starts with tonight’s trip to Yale and tomorrow’s visit to Brown, this group of Tigers (11-10, 2-5) may ruin the run.
Princeton’s worst Ivy start since 1978-79 has featured some remarkable collapses. The Tigers blew double-digit leads in the final eight minutes of losses at Dartmouth at Pennsylvania. A week ago tonight, Cornell came to Jadwin Gym and stomped them with a 20-0 second-half run in a 66-58 Big Red win.
“Even if we won the rest of our games, it wouldn’t be enough,” Logan said. “I’ll remember those losses the rest of my life.”
High expectations accompany the Tigers – one preseason publication picked them to win the Ivy and an NCAA tournament game. But little has gone right since conference play began.
The biggest problem, first-year coach and Princeton grad Joe Scott said, lies on defense, where the Tigers can’t pick up the principles of the matchup zone he first installed at Air Force.
Scott led the Falcons to the NCAA last year. So, for reassurance, he’s watched two Air Force games on television.
“It was therapeutic,” he said. “I saw what it’s supposed to look like. Here, when we took over, we’ve tried to implement our own stuff. Even though I went here and all that, everything is different. And if the kids hang in there, they’ll be rewarded.”
A prize came Saturday, when Princeton held off Columbia 63-53. Scott called it the team’s best defensive effort.
“They cut hard, they defended hard,” Lions forward Matt Preston said. “I have no idea why they’re in the situation they’re in.”
Yet here they are, a team fighting the Ivy competition and its program’s tradition, hopeless for an NCAA tournament berth. All the Tigers can do, Scott said, is keep working and start winning.
“The seniors have seven more cracks to see what their mark will be,” he said. “There’s a lot of tradition here, a lot of history, and their effort is what will stay.”