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Username Post: Lafayette
mrjames 
Professor
Posts: 6062

Loc: Montclair, NJ
Reg: 11-21-04
11-24-17 12:41 PM - Post#237521    
    In response to bradley

It's worth addressing all of this chatter about Harvard and its recruiting class and yada yada yada...

Harvard mostly whiffed on every recruiting class after the huge 2011 class that netted Wes, Steve, Jonah, Kenyatta and Corbin. Some of that was players not reaching potential, some of that was narrowly missing on a ton of wings, some of that was recurring injuries to players they did get. But the 2012 - 2015 classes essentially yielded Siyani, some elite moments from Zena, Corey Johnson and (maybe) Tommy McCarthy.

Which means that 2016-17 really needed to be viewed as the start of a complete rebuild, not sustaining something from the past. Harvard's 10th rated freshman class was worth 11 win shares last season (easily a record for an Ivy freshman class) and so far this season has been worth nearly 2 win shares (pacing for 12ish). Corey Johnson is the only player to have seen the rotation from the 2014 or 2015 classes. Harvard's team is actually younger than it was last year.

I don't know who had this fear that Harvard's freshmen would just run the table for four years, but it badly overestimated what was left in the cupboard to support that 2016 class. Harvard's 2016 class added to a stable core of a mostly upperclassmen starting five would have been competitive with Princeton last year and could have fulfilled that "all four years" talk, but that simply wasn't there.

Once the luck starts to regress (105 ORAT on poss with a 3-pointer will rise to the 130 neighborhood, for instance), Harvard's going to hit its stride and be just fine.
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