Tiger hoops drops opener
By: Bob Nuse
While the Princeton University men’s basketball team opened the season with an unimpressive 54-41 loss to Drexel in the NIT Preseason Tip-Off Tournament on Monday night, don’t be too quick to write this season off for the Tigers.
Joe Scott, who is beginning his second year as the Tigers’ head coach, has a plan. And his plan is to see Princeton playing its best basketball in February, not on opening night in November.
"I’m not going to blame our youth, but it probably had a little something to do with it," said Scott, who started a freshman and a pair of sophomores on Monday night. "We’re going to rely on those guys, so we’re going to take our lumps a little bit relying on them. We might have to come up with some new way to speed up their process. It doesn’t matter who you play in Division I. You’re not going to win one game if you get shoved around.
"We’ll see how much we improve over the next five days. It’s no secret, that’s what the season is about, improving. I think we’ll play better on Sunday."
For the first five minutes of Monday’s opener, Princeton looked like anything but an inexperienced team. The Tigers made five of their first seven shots and had an ýPage=023 Column=001 OK,0001.03þ
early 13-5 lead. But Princeton didn’t score again for six minutes and was outscored 21-3 over a 14-minute stretch before falling behind, 28-19, at halftime.
The biggest factor in the Drexel run may have been foul trouble, which forced Princeton senior Scott Greenman, junior Luke Owings and sophomore Noah Savage to the bench. The Tigers made just two of 14 shots over the final 15 minutes and were out-rebounded, 21-6, in the half.
"Rebounding was obviously the difference in the game," said Scott, whose team returns to action Sunday at Lehigh in a 3:30 p.m. start. "They jumped over our backs and got the ball. I thought they played very well in the second half. We were able to get it down to a four-point game, but then some of the same stuff started showing up. We’d lose the ball at critical junctures. We had the ball taken out of our hands at a key point in time. That’s what the game was. I think it was pretty clear the difference in the game was they were a little more aggressive and went after the ball."
Princeton did manage to close the gap to 36-32 with just over 12 minutes left in the game, but the Dragons then went on a 12-3 run to regain control. For the game, Princeton shot just 15 of 46, taking 30 of their shots from three-point range. And the Tigers were out-rebounded, 46-17 for the game.
"We have to get the ball inside and see what happens from there," said Scott, whose team went to the free throw line just three times in the game. "I think if we can make that improvement on offense, you’ll see the improvement on defense. We’ll be more physical and more aggressive, to a certain extent. Those are the things we have to get better at.
"From a coaching standpoint, I need to do a better job of stressing to them truly what the nature of our offense is. It’s not a thing that goes side to side. It’s a thing that has to go north and south and get the ball inside. If you’re doing that, shots go in more often. It’s the sign of a young team, but we have to learn from this and grow quickly because we don’t have any easy games."
Princeton was led in scoring by Savage, who finished with 15 points on five three-point shots. Harrison Schaen, who made his return to the Tigers after taking a year off from school, finished with nine points.
But the problems for the Tigers started with the foul trouble. Once Greenman, the PU point guard, went to the bench, Drexel went on a 16-0 run.
"That was a big part of the game because it changes the game a whole lot," Scott said. "We can’t have those guys get fouls. Those guys have to zero in on staying on the court because they’re our head. They have to be on the court.
"Owings is a junior and Greenman is a senior, but everyone else is a freshman or a sophomore. That’s all experience. I think there are things we can do from a coaching standpoint to speed things up."
And once the Tigers do that, they should be playing more like the team Scott envisions them being this year.
"We have a long vision here of the whole season and how I want us to be playing in February," Scott said. "But you can’t make all these changes right off the bat. We’ll start to do some of these things in practice to get to that point.
"We have to improve off of this game. I have confidence Alex (Okafor) will improve and Geoff (Kestler, both freshmen) will improve. And Scotty is going to be solid. And Noah is only a sophomore. We’re going to stick with it for a while and see if we can get better."

