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Princeton University Athletics
Princeton University
Marist
Players Mentioned
Men's Basketball Rolls into Finals Break, Defeats Marist 68-57
January 06, 2011 | Men's Basketball
PRINCETON -- In the final game before the exam break, the Princeton men's basketball team defeated Marist 68-57 Wednesday night at Jadwin Gym to improve to 11-4 on the season.
The Tigers have now won nine of their last 10 games, the only blemish in that stretch coming last Thursday at Central Florida, No. 19 in the AP poll, in a game in which Princeton led inside of the four-minute mark of the second half before UCF came back to hold on to its undefeated status.
Rebounding hurt the Tigers in that game, as UCF won the battle of the boards 39-22 with 12 offensive rebounds that helped stave off the upset. Against Marist, Princeton won that stat 38-34, though the Red Foxes did come up with 12 second-chance rebounds.
"We tried to be a little more attentive to that and I thought we were," Sydney Johnson, the Franklin C. Cappon-Edward G. Green '40 head coach of men's basketball, said. "They still did get some offensive rebounds and that's an issue, but I thought we were trying and that's the first step towards being pretty good."
Marist fell to 3-12 on the season two games after defeating Princeton's Ivy foe Penn to break a four-game skid.
Princeton will enter the exam break, which brings with it 17 days away from competition, having won 11 games over Division I opponents, tying the most such wins before the first Ivy game in program history alongside the 1997-98 team.
With the annual Division III game against The College of New Jersey up next on Jan. 23 and the first weekend of Ivy League games against Brown and Yale looming on Jan. 28 and 29, the true test will soon be at hand.
"The task is far from over. It hasn't even started," Johnson said. "I'm thankful for how they've competed and I think they should feel good about themselves to this point, but the reality is the task is just about to begin."
The Tigers stifled Marist early on, using a 13-0 run to turn a seven-point game midway through the first half into a 20-point lead at 30-10 with more than four minutes to go before the break. Marist missed nine straight shots during that run of nearly six minutes.
But the Red Foxes whittled the deficit down to as low as 12 before halftime and had another run in them still. Princeton missed eight shots in a 12-0 run over more than seven minutes for Marist that made it a five-point game at 41-36 with 11:04 to play.
"We hit a stretch there in the second half where we weren't making shots," Johnson said. "One or two of them I wasn't happy with. Four or five of them I was. It just didn't go down."
That's where the comeback ended for Marist, as Princeton scored the next eight points and never saw the lead dip below double digits the rest of the way.
Both teams had a forgettable night from beyond the arc, with Princeton making 3 of 18 and Marist 2 of 16.
"I don't think we did a fabulous job on the perimeter, but I do think the pressure was there and we were doing a decent job of talking to each other on our switches and staying with that," senior tri-captain Dan Mavraides said of the 3-point defense. "A couple mistakes, but for the most part I thought we did a pretty decent job."
Mirroring the team's overall stats, with four players averaging double figures and all four between 14 and 12 points per game, the Tigers enjoyed balanced scoring against the Red Foxes. Mavraides led Princeton with 16 points, with Douglas Davis adding 15, Kareem Maddox 12, Ian Hummer 11 and Brendan Connolly with a last-minute dunk to tie his career best with 10 points. Princeton has had five players in double figures in four games this season, the most such games since the 1973-74 season.
Hummer led the team with seven rebounds while also nearly getting as many assists as the entire Marist team. The sophomore tied a career high with five assists, one fewer than the Red Foxes' six. Sam Prescott led Marist with 12 points off the bench.
The Jan. 23 game against TCNJ will begin at 2 p.m. in Jadwin Gym.