Light Blue scoring suffers late in game

With 10:10 remaining in the second half in Saturday’s game at Yale, the Lions were in a good position to upset the Bulldogs, who are currently second in Ivy standings. Columbia was only down one, 46-45, and Columbia senior guard and captain Jazmin Fuller had the ball. But Yale freshman guard Hayden Latham prevented the Lions from taking the lead—she stole the ball from Fuller, who promptly fouled her. Off the inbounds pass, the Bulldogs hit a three-pointer in transition and went on a 27-14 run to end the game.

The night before, in Providence, the Lions were close to upsetting the fourth-ranked team in the conference. Tied at 57 with Brown heading into overtime, the Lions ultimately lost the game due to a 15-6 run by the Bears, solidifying Columbia’s seventh Ivy loss.

“When you are playing in a game like we played at Brown, where it’s back-and-forth, back-and-forth, back-and-forth, and there aren’t really any big runs, where no team is really up by more than five … it comes down to who makes the critical run at the right time,” head coach Paul Nixon said. “For Brown to make their final run with 1:30 left in overtime, you can’t recover.”

“I think it’s one of those two things [that] happens every basketball game,” Nixon said. “Either one team is dominating the runs, or it’s back-and-forth and a team makes a run at the right time.”

The previous weekend, Columbia was within five points of Dartmouth before the Big Green pulled away in the last 10 minutes. The Light Blue had also held even with Harvard, save for a four-minute stretch in each half, including a 9-0 run—75 percent of Harvard’s eventual 12-point margin of victory—to end the first. If the Lions had been better able to withstand these runs, by either limiting their duration or by securing a larger lead before they occured, Columbia would, at worst, have been able to make the final score closer. At best, it could have won.

With a team like Princeton, which can handle runs on both offense and defense, coming up on the schedule, Columbia has been working in practice to try to understand the dynamics of a run. Nixon said he sometimes lets the players play on in drills after a mistake, so that they can better learn how to handle those situations during a game. This way, when the other team does go on a run, the Lions will have experience learning how to regroup and recover.

“Ultimately, they gotta be able to do that on the floor,” Nixon said.

The Light Blue is one of the more inexperienced teams in the conference—typically, Columbia starts three sophomores, a junior, and a senior. By contrast, Princeton, the top of the Ancient Eight, starts two seniors and three juniors. Leadership and maturity on the court are key.

“I can’t just be burning a timeout every single time the other team scores a couple of possessions in a row,” Nixon said. “It really needs to be a little bit more awareness on the floor by our players at the time that, ‘Hey, they’re starting to get a little momentum here, they’re starting on a little run, we really need to make sure for this next possession that we get together, that we execute, that we get a good shot, and that we make it. That we stop the run.’”

Like in other aspects of the game, the Lions’ response to quick runs by the other team has been improving throughout the season, but Nixon is continuing to press the team for more.

“Just trying, being competitive, coming close, it’s not going to be good enough anymore,” Nixon said. “We gotta take that last step.”