Princeton University Athletics
Friday TigerBlog - Tip-Off, Face-Off
March 13, 2026 | Tiger Blog
The current UMass men's basketball season began with a 78-72 loss to Marshall on Nov. 3.
That was a Monday. What was Justin Lafleur doing that day? He was getting ready for the upcoming Princeton-Dartmouth football game.
After all, he was the Dartmouth football athletic communications contact at the time. He probably in his wildest imagination couldn't have anticipated that, come March, he'd be the contact for a team that would make the biggest seismic impact on the NCAA men's basketball selections.
And yet there he was yesterday in Cleveland, in his new role with the UMass men's basketball team, watching his new team take down previously 31-0 Miami 87-83 to advance to the MAC semifinals. UMass had lost six of seven games heading into the tournament.
Will Miami get an at-large bid? Probably. If so, then that also means that the MAC will have more than one team for the first time since 1999, which further means some other team is now on the outside looking in.
Congrats to Justin, one of the really good guys in college athletic communications. And one of the hardest working.
Justin's athletic communications counterpart for that football game against Princeton back in November was Warren Croxton, who is also the contact for the women's basketball team. As such, he is in Ithaca for the Ivy League tournament, which begins today at 4:30 when the top-seeded Tigers take on Brown, followed by the second game, between Columbia and Harvard.
Princeton went 2-0 against Brown this season and allowed 86 points in the two games combined against a team that averages 61 per game. Speaking of defense, the Bears lead the Ivy League, allowing just 56.5 per game; Princeton scored 58 and 69 in the two wins.
The Tigers, for their part, led the Ivy League in scoring offense, with 73.1 points per game, the highest total in any of Carla Berube's six seasons as head coach. The Tigers start four players who average double figures and a fifth who averages 9.8.
Brown is led by unanimous first-team All-Ivy selection Grace Arnolie, whose father Anthony was on Penn's basketball team and was a classmate of TigerBlog's, who sought him out at the game this year at Jadwin Gym to say hello and who had to explain that while, yes, in fact, TB was dressed head-to-toe in Princeton gear that he was, in fact, a Penn classmate. Arnolie (Grace) was second in the league in scoring at 17.5 per game and had 14 in each game against Princeton.
As TB said, tip-off will be at 4:30, which means that you can watch that game on ESPN+ and then shift over to the men's hockey game against Union, also on ESPN+. Opening face-off is at 7 from Hobey Baker Rink.
The game is the start of a best-of-three ECAC quarterfinal series, with Game 2 tomorrow at 7 and, if necessary, Game 3 Sunday at 4. The winner gets a trip to the ECAC semifinals next weekend in Lake Placid.
Princeton, the fourth seed, is playing a home ECAC quarterfinal series for the first time since 2009 and for the first time in the ECAC playoffs at all since 2018. It's been a remarkable turnaround in Year 2 under head coach Ben Styer, as the Tigers went from a ninth-place finish with 25 points last year to a fourth-place finish with 37 points this season.
Princeton split its two games against Union this season, with a 5-1 win at Union and a 4-2 loss at Baker Rink.
Princeton had two All-ECAC selections, with goalie Arthur Smith and forward Kai Daniells both named to the third team. Daniells leads the team with 16 goals and is second with 16 assists (David Jacobs leads the team with 20 assists), which makes Daniells the first Tiger with at least 16 of each in a season since Ryan Kuffner had 22 goals and 22 assists in 2017-18, the last time Princeton reached the NCAA tournament.
The other quarterfinals have Clarkson at No. 1 Quinnipiac, Colgate at No. 2 Dartmouth and Harvard at No. 3 Cornell. As an aside, two of the other seven remaining teams have Directors of Athletics who used to work at Princeton — Colgate's Yariv Amir and Union's Jim McLaughlin.
The semifinal matchups will be determined by seedings among the four remaining teams.
