Light Blue feels growing pains on the court

11-0. 14-3. 9-0. And, of course, 26-5. No, these aren’t some obscure football scores. These are the margins of some of the second-half runs that the Ivy League opponents of the Columbia men’s basketball team have gone on to help them beat the Lions this season.

In five of Columbia’s seven Ivy League losses—all of them except the loss at Harvard and the overtime defeat at Penn this past Saturday—a sustained run in the second half has helped the Light Blue’s opponents either come back from a deficit or open up a significant lead. This lack of in-game consistency has measured the difference between Columbia’s strong play and its weak league record of 3-7, which has it only one spot above the joint cellar-dwellers Brown and Dartmouth.

The heartbreaking loss to Yale two weekends ago (which doesn’t bear recounting) has less egregious and emotionally scarring parallels in other recent Ivy League losses. For proof of the trend, we need look no further than New Jersey—Columbia’s last three games against Princeton have followed a remarkably similar script. This past weekend, Columbia held a two-point lead early in the second half, but a 14-3 Princeton run put the Tigers up for good. Earlier in the season, when the Lions faced the Tigers in Levien, an 11-0 run similarly turned the tide in a winnable contest for Columbia. Going back to last season, a 13-3 Princeton run in the teams’ second contest of the year turned a Columbia lead into a deficit in the last five minutes, and Princeton went on to win.

Basketball is a game of streaks, more so than almost any other sport. Unfortunately, there’s no specific formula for stopping a run or going on one yourself. Coaches try to use a combination of timeouts, substitutions, and tactical changes to slow down or reverse another team’s momentum, but ultimately the ability to respond to a big run depends on mental toughness and winning experience. The latter is something that Columbia lacks. Despite the veteran leadership of seniors like Steve Egee, the Lions are still largely a team of underclassmen, and Kyle Smith is in only his second year with the program.

College basketball programs operate on a unique talent cycle. The possibility of having players for only four years at a time, and the dual emphasis coaches must place on making the most of their current talent and recruiting the best talent available for the future, means that most programs require several years of continuity at the head coach level before achieving success.

The recent history of Ivy League basketball supports this notion. Last season, Princeton head coach Sydney Johnson took the Tigers to the Ivy League title in his fourth year with the program. Steve Donahue was in his 10th year at Cornell when he took the Big Red all the way to the Sweet 16 in 2010. This year, first-place Harvard’s Lord Voldemort—I mean, Tommy Amaker—is in his fifth year as head coach in Cambridge. James Jones has been in New Haven for a league-high 12 seasons, and Yale is 7-3.

The immediate future of the Columbia men’s basketball team further reflects the peculiarities of the college talent cycle. Joe Jones, not Kyle Smith, recruited most of the Lions’ strongest players—juniors Brian Barbour and Mark Cisco, along with the injured Noruwa Agho. For the remainder of this season and next, especially if Agho returns for a fifth year, these three players will represent the core of the team and the best hope for the Lions to compete for an Ivy League title (well, just next year for that).

Yet no chemistry problem or clash of styles has stood in the way of a successful partnership between players and coach—Agho developed into a much more complete player under Smith last year, doubling his assist total while maintaining his impressive scoring rate, and Barbour and Cisco have blossomed this year. Rather, the Light Blue’s difficulties in closing out games appear to represent the growing pains that come when a talented team must turn a losing history into a winning future.

Sam Klug is a Columbia College senior majoring in history. He is a Spectrum opinion blogger.
sports@columbiaspectator.com