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Princeton University Athletics
Princeton University
Brown
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Brown Stops Men's Basketball's Ivy-Unbeaten Run, 75-65
February 20, 2011 | Men's Basketball
For the second straight February, Brown dealt the Princeton men's basketball team a surprise setback in the thick of the Ivy League race. This one, a 75-65 Tiger defeat, gave Princeton its first Ivy League loss and tied it in the loss column with chasing Harvard.
A year ago, it was Princeton in pursuit of Cornell with little margin for error, having already lost to the Big Red in Jadwin. Last Feb. 20, Brown picked up its fourth Ivy win in 10 tries by defeating the Tigers 57-54 in Princeton.
This year, 364 days later, Brown improved to 10-14 overall and 3-7 in the Ivy, while Princeton fell to 20-5 overall and 8-1 in the league.
"They did a little bit of what they did last year at Jadwin when they beat us. They just packed it in," Sydney Johnson, the Franklin C. Cappon-Edward G. Green '40 head coach said. "We've got capable shooters and we just didn't knock it down."
Princeton was briefly the only team in Division I without a conference loss after Texas had fallen to Nebraska earlier Saturday. It also briefly had the nation's second-longest winning streak at 10 games behind the 12 of George Mason, but both streaks came to an end.
Brown shot 56% in the first half and led by as much as 11 on a Garrett Leffelman 3-pointer at 35-24 with 2:31 before the break. Princeton answered with a 6-0 run to close the half.
"They got a nice 11-point lead and we got a little bit scrappier and used our defense to get back into the game," Johnson said. "But we just didn't really apply ourselves the way we needed defensively long enough to make it a win for us."
Princeton missed all 10 3-pointers it tried in the opening stanza, part of a 38.5% first half for the Tigers overall. Ian Hummer made 5 of 6 from the field in the first 20 minutes, all from inside the arc, to lead the Tigers with 10 first-half points and seven rebounds.
Brown did cool down in the second half, but the Tigers never warmed up. Princeton shot 37.9% after the break, below Brown's 40.9%.
"We struggled to keep guys in front of us and our help defense wasn't what it needed to be," Johnson said. "We've got to own up for that."
Princeton's only lead was brief, lasting just 30 seconds. A Hummer bucket put Princeton ahead 45-44 with 12:28 to go in the game, but Brown retook the lead on a Leffelman 3-pointer and never surrendered it.
"If we're not making shots and we give up 75, we have no shot at anything," Johnson said. "That's the part that we've got to face. You miss some shots, you turn it over sometimes, but you've got to come down and get stops and we just didn't do that."
Kareem Maddox led Princeton with 19 points while Hummer had 18 to go with 12 rebounds for his fourth double-double of the season. Elsewhere, though, the Tigers lacked for scoring. No other Princeton player had more than five points.
The Tigers will look to start a new streak Friday when they host Cornell at 7 p.m. in Jadwin Gym.