City of Basketball Love

Josh Verlin (@jmverlin)
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It took a few extra seconds for Princeton to celebrate its 2017 Ivy League championship.

As the streamers fired and the Tigers started to rush onto the court at the end of a 71-59 win over Yale, the referees ran in, holding things up -- in holding the ball for the final 30-plus seconds, Princeton had committed a shot clock violation with exactly 0.7 seconds remaining on the clock.

So the Princeton faithful and the team they were there to support had to wait for the Palestra crew to clear the floor of the colorful ribbons and get everything settled down, for the sole purpose of allowing Yale the ability to inbounds the ball and run the final three-quarters of a second off the clock.

That was okay with Princeton, considering the Tigers needed to wait longer (and work harder) than any other team in Ivy history to secure its spot in March Madness.

If this was any one of the previous 62 seasons of Ivy League competition, Princeton would have been locked in with a win over Harvard on the penultimate day of the regular season. But with the installation of the inaugural league tournament, a 14-0 mark in league play wasn’t good enough for Princeton.

The Tigers had to come down to Philadelphia to play two sudden death games, first against archrival Penn -- in its own building, no less -- and then against Yale, the defending league champs, a day later.

No sweat.

“We really had the same approach we’ve had all year coming into these two games,” senior forward Steven Cook said. “We talked about what was at stake and what that meant for us and the program, but we prepared the same way, we did the same scout, we talked about the same things that we always talked about and we knew that was what was going to carry us.”

The Tigers’ perfect run through the Ancient Eight was the culmination of a 19-game winning streak, dating back to a loss to Monmouth on Dec. 20. That left Princeton on 4-6 on the season, and with two seniors (Hans Brase, Henry Caruso) having been ruled out with season-ending knee injuries over the span of a week in December.

It’s the first trip back to the NCAA Tournament in six years for a program that went eight times between 1989 and 2001 but had been back just twice since, in 2004 and 2011, under previous head coaches John Thompson III and Sydney Johnson. 

Now the challenge for the Tigers will be to win a game in the dance for the first time since 1998, when the Bill Carmody-coached No. 5 seed knocked off UNLV in the first round before falling to Michigan State. They haven’t been any further than that since a national semifinal appearance in 1965; Princeton reached the Sweet 16 in 1967, but that only took one win in a field of 23 teams.

Henderson was a senior on that ‘98 squad, averaging 8.9 ppg and 4.5 apg for a team that lost just once in the regular season and ended the season ranked No. 8 in the Associated Press poll.

“This is a lot more satisfying,” he said. “A lot of my teammates were here tonight and they’re sharing with me pride in the program, because I think they’re proud of the way these guys represent Princeton basketball.”

Despite the losses of Brase and Caruso, Henderson still had plenty of senior leadership to rely on to lead the way.

Ivy League Player of the Year Spencer Weisz, a tremendous all-around talent at 6-foot-4, averaged 10.5 ppg, 5.4 rpg and 4.0 apg. Cook, a 6-5 forward, averaged 13.7 ppg, tying for the team lead with sophomore Devin Cannady, while averaging 5.1 rpg and shooting 42 percent from the 3-point arc.

The youth is also impressive, including Ivy Defensive Player of the Year Myles Stephens (12.6 ppg), a 6-4 sophomore who went off for 23 points and eight rebounds in the championship game win. Cannady and junior wing Amir Bell (6.6 ppg) will be back next year, and a few of the Tigers’ lesser-featured rotation players have a lot of potential as well.

First things first, though.

Princeton will try to become the third Ivy League program to win an NCAA Tournament game in the last five years, joining Harvard (2013, 2014) and Yale, which toppled 5-seed Baylor 79-75 in the first round last season and then nearly took out Duke in the second.

No Ivy team has made it any further since Penn's Final Four appearance in 1979.

Later Sunday night, Princeton received a No. 12 seed in the NCAA Tournament and a first-round game against No. 5 West Virginia in Buffalo, N.Y. on Thursday afternoon.

“We’re hungry, we’re not satisfied with just going to the tournament,” Weisz said. “We’ve had goals and we’ve accomplished two of them and we want to make a push at going deep into the tournament. Being there is not good enough for us, we want to get a few wins.”

After decades without a stay in March Madness longer than a weekend, this could be the Princeton team that gets it done.

The program’s certainly waited long enough.