The Boston University men’s basketball team takes on its third Ivy League opponent in four games tonight when it faces Harvard University at Lavietes Pavilion.
The Terriers (2-2) will be playing the third game of a four-game road trip tonight, while the Crimson (2-1, 0-0 Ivy League) are coming off a win on Saturday over the Terriers’ America East rival, the State University of New York at Stony Brook.
BU started the road trip exactly one week ago at another nearby rival, Boston College. The Eagles, namely guards Troy Bell and Ryan Sidney, proved too much for the Terriers, who fell by 19 points. The Terriers rebounded from the loss to go 2-0 against the Ivy League, pulling away in the second half for a 12-point win over Dartmouth College.
While the win over Dartmouth, the preseason pick to finish in the Ivy League cellar, was not as big as a win over BC might have been, BU Coach Dennis Wolff said his team played strong defense in both games but has yet to play up to his expectations.
‘I thought we played reasonably well defensively in both games. I don’t know if we made a lot of improvement [overall], other than the fact that Dartmouth wasn’t as good as BC,’ Wolff said. ‘I don’t think we’ve remotely played the way we’re capable of yet.’
Harvard, the preseason pick to finish fifth in the Ivy League, will come at the Terriers with experience aplenty in the starting lineup. The five seniors that will most likely take the floor for the opening tip revolve around guard Patrick Harvey, who scored 15 Saturday against Stony Brook and 15 in last season’s 51-41 win over BU at ‘The Roof.’
‘Patrick Harvey is a very good outside shooter, and has hurt us before,’ Wolff said. ‘I think that we have to match how physical they play. They’re a very physical team.’
While Harvard has wins this season over Stony Brook and Fairfield University, perhaps its most impressive game was the loss to the College of the Holy Cross. Harvey led the way against the two-time defending Patriot League champions, filling the hoop for 23 points and dishing off six assists. Harvard trailed by as many as 19 in the first half, but could get no closer than three in the second. Holy Cross proved no joke, as the Crusaders beat the Eagles Sunday night by one.
The Terriers come into tonight’s game healthy and deep. Wolff is using a larger rotation than ever before, delving deep into his roster, using all 14 players against Columbia University, 12 against BC and 10 against Dartmouth. Wolff, whose team outscored the Dartmouth bench, 40-9, and has more than twice as many bench points, 111, than its opponent, 51, hopes that his team will ‘continue to get good play off the bench.’
That bench, at least for tonight, will include junior Jason Grochowalski, who scored 10 of his game-high 19 against Dartmouth in the second- half run that put the game out of reach. Wolff said sophomore forward Rashad Bell would most likely start tonight at Harvard, but hinted that Grochowalski’s improvement since a three-point performance in the opener at Stanford University did not go unnoticed.
With a tough game at St. Joseph’s University looming on Thursday, Wolff would not look past tonight’s game, even though BU is 7-1 against the Crimson during his tenure at BU.
‘They start five seniors, and they’re a good team,’ Wolff said. ‘We’ve had nothing but close games with them in the time I’ve been the coach here, so I would anticipate that we’ll have the same thing [tonight].’
This is an account occasionally used by the Daily Free Press editors to post archived posts from previous iterations of the site or otherwise for special circumstance publications. See authorship info on the byline at the top of the page.
