.png&width=24&type=webp)
Princeton University Athletics
Players Mentioned
As Season Draws Near, 59 Facts on Princeton Men's Hoops
October 30, 2014 | Men's Basketball
In honor of Princeton nearing the start of the 59th season of Ivy League basketball, here are 59 facts on the Tigers heading into the 2014-15 campaign:
1. Princeton will open its 115th season of varsity men's basketball on Nov. 14. The first game was on Jan. 26, 1901.
2. Nov. 14 is four days later than Princeton's earliest-ever game, which occurred on Nov. 10 in 2006 and again in 2012 and 2013.
3. Princeton first played a December game to start its second season in Dec. 1901, but the team didn't play in November until 1943 and went without a November game from 1946-1971.
4. Princeton made its first trip to California in 1967, playing at Stanford. The team will head to California twice this year, something the Tigers have never done.
5. Princeton could use a turnaround of its prospects in the Golden State, where the team has lost its last three contests. Princeton's last win in America's 31st state came in 2003, when the team won at Fresno State.
6. Princeton will play in the Wooden Legacy in Fullerton and Anaheim, California, over Thanksgiving weekend. This will be Princeton's first three-game in-season bracketed tournament since the Maui Invitational in Nov. 2007.
7. Should Princeton start sophomore Spencer Weisz and freshman Amir Bell in the same game at any point this season, they'd be the first pair of New Jersey natives to start a game for the Tigers since Noah Savage '08 and Scott Greenman '06 in the 2005-06 season finale vs. Penn.
8. Princeton has never played a game on Thanksgiving Day, something the team will do this year to open the Wooden Legacy against UTEP.
9. Princeton's first game prior to Thanksgiving wasn't until 1985. This year, the team will have four games prior to turkey day.
10. Mitch Henderson is presently ninth all-time among Princeton head coaches in wins, with 58. He is likely to pass former teammate and predecessor Sydney Johnson, who has 66 wins, and his former assistant coach, John Thompson III, who has 68 wins, this season. That would put Henderson seventh, and Bill Carmody, who coached Henderson at Princeton and hired him as an assistant coach at Northwestern, is sixth at 92 wins.
11. Princeton and Rider will play for the 14th time in series history on Nov. 14, but it'll be just the second time that Rider has been Princeton's season-opening opponent. The other time was in 1944, when the teams played Princeton's first game at Baker Rink, which served as Princeton basketball's home for three seasons between University Gym and Dillon Gym.
12. Jadwin Gym, which hosted its first Princeton basketball game on Jan. 25, 1969, will host its 46th full season in 2014-15.
13. Princeton's game at George Mason will bring Princeton to the Washington, D.C./Northern Virginia area for the first time since a 2009 game at George Washington.
14. Of Princeton's non-conference series that will continue in 2014-15, Lafayette is the longest that has been played annually. The teams have played in 24 straight seasons and will make it a 25 when the Tigers visit Easton on Nov. 19.
15. Though the men's basketball staff includes four people with varsity playing experience, there is only one double-double between them, by new Director of Basketball Operations Craig Moore on Feb. 19, 2008 against Iowa for Northwestern. The roster has six double doubles, with one for Denton Koon, two for Spencer Weisz and three for Hans Brase.
16. Princeton's fourth opponent, Incarnate Word, is in its second year in Division I and is a member of the Southland Conference. Princeton has played a game against a Southland Conference team only once, an 86-51 win over Nicholls State on Dec. 22, 1995 in Ames, Iowa.
17. Princeton and UTEP, the Tigers' fourth opponent, were a handful of points away from meeting in another tournament last season. UTEP would have been Princeton's opponent in the CBI quarterfinals had it been able to hold home court against Fresno State, but the Miners lost, 61-56.
18. Though the Tigers have made 14 previous trips to California, only one other has been south of Fresno. Princeton faced Indiana and UCLA, beating Indiana but losing by a point to AP-No. 2 UCLA, at UCLA's Bruin Classic in 1968.
19. John Wooden, the Wooden Legacy's namesake, faced off against Princeton twice, both against Princeton's winningest coach, Pete Carril. Wooden got the win both times, in 1968 in Westwood and in 1969 in Manhattan.
20. Princeton will face at least five first-time opponents this season, with potentially more in the Wooden Legacy. The five already on the schedule are Incarnate Word, Stony Brook, Lipscomb, Norfolk State and Rowan.
21. Princeton has finished in the top three in the Ivy League in six straight seasons, the only team in the league able to make that claim.
22. Three Princeton players who have played for Mitch Henderson have reached 1,000 career points: T.J. Bray '14, Ian Hummer '13 and Douglas Davis '12. It's possible that another Tiger could reach that milestone this season, with Denton Koon at 594. Princeton has had at least one 400-point scorer in each of the last four seasons.
23. The Tigers have just five players who played in the 2012-13 season: Hans Brase, Bobby Garbade, Denton Koon, Mike Washington Jr., and Clay Wilson.
24. The players currently on the roster have a career scoring total of 1,980 points. That would place them second on Princeton's career scoring list behind Bill Bradley '65, who scored 2,503 points in his three seasons.
25. Junior Hans Brase more than doubled his scoring output from freshman to sophomore years, scoring 150 points (5.4 ppg) as a rookie and 337 last year (11.2 ppg).
26. Brase tried 23 3-pointers as a freshman and 105 as a sophomore. His shooting percentage from beyond the arc fell from .435 as a rookie to .324 as a sophomore, but his shooting clip inside the arc rose from .448 as a frosh to .523 last season.
27. While playing an important role around the rim, Hans Brase averaged 5.4 fouls per 40 minutes as a freshman and lowered that to 4.1 per 40 minutes as a sophomore.
28. Brase bettered his free throw shooting from a .630 clip as a freshman to .738 as a sophomore despite taking nearly twice as many attempts, shooting 54 times as a freshman and 107 last year.
29. Hans Brase ended the season with a double-double at Fresno State, dropping in 19 points and pulling down 10 rebounds. Both stats led the team in the 2013-14 season finale.
30. Princeton's freshmen scored 21 percent of the team's points last season. In 2012-13, that number was 8 percent, with Hans Brase as the only freshman to score.
31. Princeton's 70.6 ppg average last season was its highest since the 1971-72 season, when the Tigers averaged 79.7 ppg.
32. Princeton's 64.4 ppg allowed was also its highest since the 1971-72 season, when the team allowed 69.9 ppg.
33. Princeton's 278 3-pointers last season were a team record, surpassing the 264 the team made in the 1997-98 season.
34. Princeton has played at least 30 games in four of the last five seasons. The team had played 30 games only four times in its history before the 2009-10 season, in 1999-2000, 1998-99, 1979-80 and 1974-75.
35. Princeton out-assisted its opponents last season 14.4 apg to 10.4 apg.
36. Princeton was No. 1 in the Ivy League last season in assist-to-turnover ratio at 1.3 assists per turnover, but the Tigers lose the player who led the Ivy in that category, T.J. Bray, who had an assist-to-turnover ratio of 2.9.
37. Princeton has never before played more than two games in California in the same season, but the Tigers will play four there this year between the Wooden Legacy and a visit to the University of California.
38. Senior Ben Hazel scored 165 points last season, 76 percent of his career total.
39. Senior Denton Koon was limited to 18 games last season, missing the final 11 due to injury. His 138 points last season were a career low, but he'd scored 294 the previous year while Ian Hummer '13 led the team with 455.
40. Though Koon's scoring average was 7.7 ppg last year, down from 10.5 ppg the year before, he had a career-best 3.5 rebounds per game last season.
41. Of the 17 players on the roster, just seven have played more than one season for Princeton.
42. Sophomore Spencer Weisz was the Ivy League Rookie of the Year last season. He was the sixth Tiger to win the award since its inception in 1971 (as the Sophomore of the Year) and the first since 2001.
43. Weisz was a four-time Ivy League Rookie of the Week last season, the most awards for a Princeton freshman since the 1998-99 season.
44. Weisz's 145 rebounds in 2013-14 were the most for a Princeton freshman since the 1998-99 season.
45. Princeton will face at least one Pac-12 team this season when it takes on California on Dec. 13 in Berkeley. Three of Princeton's last five Pac-12 (or then-Pac-10) opponents have been Cal, most recently in 2009 in Berkeley. The conference has a five-game winning streak against the Tigers, with Princeton's last win being a famous one, the 43-41 victory over UCLA in the 1996 NCAA Tournament. Princeton could also face Washington this season depending on how the Wooden Legacy plays out.
46. Princeton once held a four-game winning streak against the then-Pac-8, defeating Stanford, California, Stanford and Washington State from 1970-72.
47. Princeton has won 26 Ivy League titles in men's basketball, the most in Ivy history. Penn has 25, and the rest of the league combined has 16.
48. Princeton will face St. Peter's, one of the eight Division I programs in New Jersey, for the second time on Dec. 10. The teams had their only other meeting on Dec. 30, 1978, a 57-36 Tiger win in Jadwin.
49. Princeton will head to Wake Forest on Dec. 31. It will be the team's third trip to the state of North Carolina in the last five seasons after games at Duke in 2010 and North Carolina State in 2011.
50. When the Tigers play at Wake Forest's Lawrence Joel Coliseum, they'll be returning to the site of their first-round game in the 1997 NCAA Tournament, when Cal edged Princeton 55-52.
51. The Wake Forest game will make it six games against teams currently in the ACC in the last five years. The list includes Duke, Florida State, N.C. State, Pitt, and Syracuse.
52. Princeton will face three New Jersey Division I opponents this year in Fairleigh Dickinson, Rider and St. Peter's. It's the most Division I Garden State foes Princeton has had on a single year's slate since 1978-79. That year's schedule featured Seton Hall, Rutgers and St. Peter's (Princeton also played Rutgers twice and Monmouth once in the 2000-01 season).
53. Princeton will host Lipscomb on Dec. 19. It'll be the first time Princeton has faced a team from Tennessee since Dec. 3, 1993, when the Tigers faced Vanderbilt in an in-season tournament at Syracuse.
54. Princeton's games against George Mason and Liberty will be the second half of series with new opponents from a year ago. The Tigers can go for the sweep in both, having defeated George Mason in Jadwin Gym and Liberty in Virginia last season.
55. Princeton will play at the Honda Center in Anaheim on Nov. 30 to conclude the Wooden Legacy. It'll be the fourth time in the last five seasons the Tigers will play at the home of an NBA or NHL team after games at the homes of the Tampa Bay Lightning and Carolina Hurricanes of the NHL and Brooklyn Nets of the NBA.
56. Mitch Henderson will coach his 100th game at Princeton when the Tigers visit St. Peter's on Dec. 10.
57. Once Mitch Henderson reaches the century mark in games coached, he'll be the ninth Princeton coach to do so, following Frederick Leuhring, Albert Wittmer, Cappy Cappon, Butch van Breda Kolff, Pete Carril, Bill Carmody, John Thompson III and Sydney Johnson.
58. Princeton has graduated its leading scorer from the previous year in three of the last four seasons and one of its top two scorers in each of the last four seasons.
59. Last season was the first time since the 2003-04 campaign that Princeton had at least three players end the season averaging at least 4.8 rebounds per game. Two of those players, Hans Brase (5.7 rpg) and Spencer Weisz (4.8 rpg), return.