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Princeton University Athletics
Princeton University
Columbia
Players Mentioned
Men's Basketball Finishes Convincing Weekend Sweep with 63-35 Win over Columbia
February 07, 2009 | Men's Basketball
PRINCETON -- For the second straight night, the Princeton men's basketball team posted a convincing Ivy League win Saturday and did it with everybody pitching in.
Zach Finley, who played 14 minutes off the bench, led the Tigers with 11 points as all 11 Princeton players who took a shot scored in a 63-35 win over Columbia.
Princeton is now 4-0 in the Ivy League and is over .500 overall, at 9-8, for the first time since November 2007 when the Tigers won their first two games of last season.
Just like Friday night against Cornell, Princeton never trailed. Columbia started 0 for 13 from the field and didn't warm up after that, finishing with 23.9% shooting for the game, a season-low for a Princeton opponent.
Princeton didn't start out hot from the field either but ended up finishing at 44.7% for the game, extending its streak of shooting 40% or better to a sixth straight contest.
The impressive weekend inspired more superlatives as the Tigers continue the climb back toward being a consistent part of the Ivy elite. Princeton hadn't allowed as few points to an Ivy foe as it did against Cornell since 1999, when Yale scored just 33 in Jadwin. No Ivy League weekend yielded fewer points for a pair of opponents since 1984, when Columbia and Cornell combined for 71; this weekend, it was 76 points for the same two teams. The Tigers hadn't beaten any Division I opponent by as many as 28 since January 2003 when UMBC lost to Princeton by 33, 76-43.
Most significant, the Tigers have already won more Ivy League games this season than in either of the last two seasons, since the team went 10-4 in league play in 2006.
Even so, some difficult games loom ahead. Next weekend features a road trip to Yale and Brown. The Bulldogs have won four straight at home and haven't lost there since the season opener against Stanford. After that one, the Tigers will have to continue up I-95 to Providence, with rival Penn looming just three days later at Jadwin Feb. 17.
But tonight's game could just as easily have been a letdown after a strong win over Cornell, and it was anything but. No Columbia player had more than five points, and the Tigers won the battle of the boards decisively, 41-29, in addition to cleaning up from the field.
"After last night, they had to get up for this game," said Sydney Johnson, the Franklin C. Cappon-Edward G. Green '40 head coach of men's basketball at Princeton. "And they did."
It's been enough so far. There are still 10 Ivy League games to go and 28 days in which to play them.