Two years after Lin left, Harvard on roll
Harvard's Jeremy Lin keeps the ball away from Michigan's Manny Harris in the second half of a basketball game. (Dec. 1, 2007) Credit: AP
PHILADELPHIA -- Here's what's really "Lin-sane": Harvard is having its best basketball season ever two years after Jeremy Lin graduated.
Harvard is 21-3, has been ranked as high as No. 21 and opened its Ivy League season with seven wins before losing to Princeton on Saturday. The Crimson is a good bet to reach its first NCAA Tournament since 1946.
Yet according to junior forward Kyle Casey, Lin's highlights leading SportsCenter every night are the only surprise in Cambridge.
"Watching a teammate on TV I did not know would happen," Casey said after Harvard beat Penn, 56-50, Friday night. "Everything else? Yeah. This is why we came to Harvard. To make history."
Casey, who leads Harvard with 11 points a game, expressed similar certitude when asked the reason for the team's success: coach Tommy Amaker. "Without a doubt, he's the catalyst," Casey said. "His work ethic. His determination to believe in what we do is just unbelievable."
Amaker, who was a standout point guard at Duke, coached Seton Hall to the Sweet 16 in 2000, then helped restore a Michigan program tarnished by scandal. Michigan fired him in March 2007 after failing to reach the NCAAs, despite winning 22 games.
The next month, Harvard snapped Amaker up. The Crimson was 8-22 in his first season, but he hit the trail to nab top recruits such as Casey, who chose Harvard over Stanford, Vanderbilt, George Washington and Davidson.
To Casey, who has won at least 20 games in his three seasons at Harvard, this is no surprise. But senior Keith Wright, who played on a 14-14 team that lost eight of nine Ivy League games three years ago, has seen the program transform.
"We did a full 180," he said. "We're selling out games. [Penn's] Palestra was sold out. For Harvard. To see us. If somebody were to tell me this was going to happen, I don't think I would have believed it."
Wright, who is second in the Ivy League with 8.6 rebounds a game, didn't choose Harvard for athletics.
"It was a family decision," he said. "Not for my family now, but for my future family."
Attending Harvard, which does not award athletic scholarships, never has been a basketball decision. The Crimson has appeared in only one NCCA Tournament. Last season, Harvard shared its first Ivy title with Princeton, but lost the tiebreaker, and the NCAA Tournament spot, on a last-second shot.
"We've got a long way to go to think of ourselves as anything along those lines," Amaker said, referring to Penn and Princeton and their 51 combined league titles.
Princeton snapped Harvard's nine-game winning streak the night after the Penn win, but that was no shocker. Harvard hasn't won at Princeton since 1989.
Afterward, the fans at Princeton, which has made 24 NCAA Tournaments, stormed the court. For a regular-season win over Harvard. Another piece of evidence that the center of Ivy League power has shifted from New Jersey to the banks of the Charles.
