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Username Post: Harvard Season Preview - StheS Podcast        (Topic#21930)
GoBigGreenBasketball 
Masters Student
Posts: 805

Age: 51
Reg: 05-19-16
10-11-18 05:45 PM - Post#262421    

Harvard Crimson - David Tannenwald (Harvard Magazine): StheS Team Preview Series
"...no excuses - only results!”


 
rbg 
Postdoc
Posts: 3044

Reg: 10-20-14
10-15-18 08:44 AM - Post#262571    
    In response to GoBigGreenBasketball

Harvard getting some love over at Sports Illustrated.

64 Reasons to Get Excited About College Basketball
https://www.si.com/college-basketball/20 18/10/10/6...

45. Harvard’s Push to Get Back to the Tournament

For four straight years, Tommy Amaker made the Crimson the mid-major conference champ no one wanted to see on the tournament’s opening weekend, but just as quickly as Harvard arrived as a March staple, it finds itself entering 2018-19 on a three-year drought, with tough losses to Yale and Penn in the Ivy League’s four-team tournament in the past two seasons. The jewels of the top-25 recruiting class of 2016 (which ranked higher than three of the previous year’s Final Four teams) are now juniors determined to reestablish the Crimson as the class of the league and an opening-weekend sleeper.

The Next Loyola-Chicago? Eleven Mid-Majors Who Could Have a Cinderella Season
https://www.si.com/college-basketball/20 18/10/15/c...

HARVARD

Harvard returns almost its entire roster, including its five top scorers and top three rebounders. Key returnees are Seth Towns, the Ivy League Player of the Year, and Bryce Aiken, who was the Ivy League Rookie of the Year as a freshman. Towns suffered a knee injury in the Ivy League championship game that certainly hurt Harvard's chances at an NCAA bid. Aiken only played in 14 games last season. Both are healthy and ready to create the type of inside-out combo that could prove devastating in March. The Ivy League is tough—Penn, Princeton and Brown are all contenders—but no one matches the depth of the Crimson.

 
palestra38 
Professor
Posts: 32682

Reg: 11-21-04
10-15-18 09:39 AM - Post#262590    
    In response to rbg

"he Ivy League is tough—Penn, Princeton and Brown are all contenders—but no one matches the depth of the Crimson. "

..No Yale love there

 
rbg 
Postdoc
Posts: 3044

Reg: 10-20-14
11-02-18 08:38 AM - Post#264027    
    In response to palestra38

A good breakdown by several writers at The Crimson. It seems that everyone will be good to go, with Aiken maybe taking more time to return to form.

https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2018/11/2/win te...


 
whitakk 
Masters Student
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Age: 32
Reg: 11-11-14
11-02-18 11:30 PM - Post#264124    
    In response to rbg

From today: “1) According to Coach Amaker, @seth_towns17 and @BryceAiken are "out indefinitely" as they continue to recover from injuries.”

https://mobile.twitter.com/dtannenwald/status/10 58...

Also a crime to leave Friday’s Northeastern off that list of nonconference games. If you buy the projections it might be a top-10 mid-major game all year.

 
PennFan10 
Postdoc
Posts: 3578

Reg: 02-15-15
11-02-18 11:39 PM - Post#264125    
    In response to whitakk

  • whitakk Said:
From today: “1) According to Coach Amaker, @seth_towns17 and @BryceAiken are "out indefinitely" as they continue to recover from injuries.”.




There’s a surprise.

 
Silver Maple 
Postdoc
Posts: 3765

Loc: Westfield, New Jersey
Reg: 11-23-04
11-03-18 10:50 AM - Post#264133    
    In response to PennFan10

Yes-- I'm shocked. That coverup was really working. Never saw this coming.

 
mrjames 
Professor
Posts: 6062

Loc: Montclair, NJ
Reg: 11-21-04
11-03-18 11:53 AM - Post#264138    
    In response to Silver Maple

I’m still confused - what’s the coverup supposed to be here?

The way I read “out indefinitely” is “I don’t care at all about the non-conference, so there’s no rush to bring them back.” I think if Ivy play started in November, the answer would be different.

 
PennFan10 
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Posts: 3578

Reg: 02-15-15
11-03-18 09:29 PM - Post#264154    
    In response to mrjames

  • mrjames Said:
I’m still confused - what’s the coverup supposed to be here?

The way I read “out indefinitely” is “I don’t care at all about the non-conference, so there’s no rush to bring them back.” I think if Ivy play started in November, the answer would be different.



Looks to me like you answered your own question. The fact that no one knows whether those two would play tomorrow or not til January is exactly the secrecy that makes no sense. If your two best players are healthy, you play them. Period. But somehow Tommy has some magic strategy that is going to wait for Harvard’s conference season to rev up the top 50 engine. I call BS.


 
Silver Maple 
Postdoc
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Loc: Westfield, New Jersey
Reg: 11-23-04
11-03-18 11:15 PM - Post#264162    
    In response to PennFan10

It's like not turning on the runway lights because "that's just what they're expecting us to do."

 
rbg 
Postdoc
Posts: 3044

Reg: 10-20-14
11-03-18 11:34 PM - Post#264165    
    In response to Silver Maple

https://collegebasketball .nbcsports.com/2018/11/03...

- Now that Amaker has indicated that Aiken and Towns will remain out, it’s going to be one of the key subplots to watch in this early college basketball season. The duo combined to average slightly over 30 points per game last season as the Crimson have huge expectations heading into this season.

Harvard is already used to playing (and playing well) without Aiken. But the loss of Towns could be huge — especially since we don’t know the severity of his injury. With the Crimson returning nearly its entire core from a team that just missed making the NCAA tournament, Harvard needs both of those guys back and healthy if they want to meet the high preseason expectations. -

 
mrjames 
Professor
Posts: 6062

Loc: Montclair, NJ
Reg: 11-21-04
11-04-18 09:10 AM - Post#264175    
    In response to PennFan10

I guess all I can say is that it’s not that simple. Some injuries have defined timetables. Some injuries “healthy” is a matter of degree and re-injury risk. In the latter situation, some games are worth playing, others aren’t.

I’m not so sure what’s so hard to understand here. Yale faced the same situation last year. Bruner’s was easy because it fell into that first bucket - done for the year. Mason’s was harder because it fell into the second bucket. Every day made him stronger and less likely to re-injure the foot, so there could be no “defined” timetable. So, he ended up being day-to-day (like Aiken was last year) for over a month before he tried to come back and they realized it wasn’t going to work.

What I’m confused by is the overtone of nefariousness in what Harvard is doing here. I usually can at least understand the arguments being made on fan boards, but I’ll be honest, this one surprises me.

 
PennFan10 
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Posts: 3578

Reg: 02-15-15
Harvard Season Preview - StheS Podcast
11-04-18 10:01 AM - Post#264178    
    In response to mrjames

I don’t think we disagree on the nature of injuries and how they work. I am pretty comfortable with my knowledge of how injuries work.

What we are talking about is the systematic lack of information that is coming from anyone in the Harvard camp. Mr James, do you know what actually happened to Towns’ knee? What is the injury? Did he have surgery? What about Aikens? Why won’t you give out information? Maybe you don’t know, which is even worse in that the culture of secrecy excludes those closest to the program.

You mentioned Yale and Makai Mason or Jordan Bruner. Go ahead and google “Makai Mason foot”. In about 5 seconds you can learn that Mason had a stress fracture and Bruner tore his meniscus. Then try to google “Seth Towns knee” and outside of the most recent coverage of TA’s press conference you get nada, zippo, nothing.

Here is the quotes from the article written based on TA’s presser, notice the last line of para 1:

Head coach Tommy Amaker spoke to reporters on Friday and indicated that reigning Ivy League Player of the Year Seth Towns and starting point guard Bryce Aiken will both remain out indefinitely with knee injuries. While Aiken has been battling knee injuries since being limited to only 14 games last season, the injury to Towns remains a bit more of a mystery.

In the Ivy League Conference Tournament title game last season, Towns sustained a knee injury with 8:20 left in the second half as Penn went on to ultimately win the game and claim the league’s NCAA tournament autobid. Towns also missed Harvard’s next contest when they lost in the opening round of the NIT to Marquette.

A September report from Jon Rothstein of CBS Sports indicated that Aiken and Towns were expected to be fully cleared for basketball activities once practice officially started. But on Oct. 20, Stadium’s Jeff Goodman reported that neither Aiken nor Towns played in Harvard’s closed preseason scrimmage against Boston College.


Oh wait, HIPAA, that explains everything........



Edited by PennFan10 on 11-04-18 10:05 AM. Reason for edit: No reason given.

 
mrjames 
Professor
Posts: 6062

Loc: Montclair, NJ
Reg: 11-21-04
Re: Harvard Season Preview - StheS Podcast
11-04-18 12:41 PM - Post#264189    
    In response to PennFan10

Okay - that makes more sense. Injured body part + timetable isn’t what you’re after, you want specific sub-part of that body part and specific treatment undertaken. Put me in the camp that doesn’t believe there’s an entitlement to that latter specificity. If you want to call that a systematic lack of information, that’s up to you. If you want to criticize this board for not actively discussing what is known... well that’s a *little* unfair, since, ya know, this particular board doesn’t really discuss much at all!

As for me - I don’t have better info than what’s been reported. My purpose for maintaining the relationships I do around the league is exclusively focused on understanding how the teams will perform (eg getting secret scrimmage results to tweak models - when I used to do them - based on a better sense of the rotation) and hopefully promoting a league on the rise (eg chasing down Ivy Tourney or ESPN deal info). If someone tells me a player is out indefinitely with a knee injury, that’s all I need for my purposes. The specifics just aren’t interesting to me - I guess that’s why I was confused before.

I get what you’re asking for now, though.

 
PennFan10 
Postdoc
Posts: 3578

Reg: 02-15-15
11-04-18 03:18 PM - Post#264193    
    In response to mrjames

As a Penn fan I don’t particularly care about Towns and Aiken until February and we’ll have a pretty good idea by then. But if I was a typical Harvard fan I’d be urinated I didn’t know more.

At least that’s how most fans operate with regard to their team.

 
Silver Maple 
Postdoc
Posts: 3765

Loc: Westfield, New Jersey
Reg: 11-23-04
11-04-18 08:22 PM - Post#264202    
    In response to PennFan10

I think the other thing the Penn fans are reacting to is what we perceive as a 'circling the wagons' mentality. We know what that often means, and the trend that tends to follow.

 
palestra38 
Professor
Posts: 32682

Reg: 11-21-04
11-04-18 09:42 PM - Post#264210    
    In response to Silver Maple

I was away for the weekend, but this proves everything I was saying and got total S.it from Harvardadgrad.

How about it Dad?

 
PennFan10 
Postdoc
Posts: 3578

Reg: 02-15-15
11-04-18 11:56 PM - Post#264218    
    In response to PennFan10

  • PennFan10 Said:
As a Penn fan I don’t particularly care about Towns and Aiken until February and we’ll have a pretty good idea by then. But if I was a typical Harvard fan I’d be urinated I didn’t know more.

At least that’s how most fans operate with regard to their team.



very strange. the word posted as urinated is not what I wrote. But the system won’t let me post the word I wrote and changes it to urinated. I wrote a word that is spelled p-i-s-s-e-d

 
rbg 
Postdoc
Posts: 3044

Reg: 10-20-14
11-05-18 09:43 AM - Post#264237    
    In response to PennFan10

The Crimson has a preview of the women's team.

https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2018/11/2/win te...

 
mrjames 
Professor
Posts: 6062

Loc: Montclair, NJ
Reg: 11-21-04
11-05-18 10:30 AM - Post#264238    
    In response to PennFan10

I'm always down for a discussion of fan psychographics.

 
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