Lions Go For Sweep of Big Red

It may be well below freezing in their hometown (and, at times, their home arena), but the cold weather has done nothing to cool off the Columbia men’s basketball team.

The Lions (10-4, 1-0 Ivy) are coming off a pair of wins that have allowed them, by mid-January, to match last season’s win total. One of those victories, a 70-61 defeat of the Cornell Big Red (5-9, 0-1) in Levien Gymnasium, gave the Light Blue their first win in an Ivy opener in three years. On Saturday, the Lions will make a return trip to Ithaca to face the Big Red again, where a victory could set the stage for an intense and exciting home stretch.

The Lions’ triumph in their first contest against Cornell was spearheaded by an incredible 10-for-13 effort from beyond the three-point arc, thanks in large part to three-for-three shooting from senior guard Jeremiah Boswell and three-for-four shooting from freshman guard Brett Loscalzo. The Lions are shooting 38 percent from long range as a team this season, a full five percentage points better than their opponents. Boswell in particular has been deadly from three-point range—the sharpshooter’s 55.6 percent accuracy ranks him eighth in the nation in three-point field goal percentage. Despite Boswell’s impressive marksmanship, head coach Joe Jones chooses not to focus on any one player’s statistics.

“I’m not that concerned about Jeremiah being there, because we’re a very good three-point shooting team overall, so I’m not all that concerned about the percentages,” Jones said. “We want to make sure we get our shooters open looks, and we have a lot of guys who can make them. That’s what makes us such a potent offensive team.”

The Lions will also look to repeat a plus-eight rebounding margin from last Saturday’s game, and the key to that effort will be keeping a body on Big Red center Eric Taylor, one of the better pivot players in the League. Taylor scored 15 points on Saturday but was held to only four rebounds.

“[Taylor] is very effective. He’s very strong, he’s very physical, and he has a terrific touch away from his left hand,” Jones remarked. “We need to make him touch the ball away from the basket, make him do things he doesn’t normally do, make him take some shots outside of the paint.”

Defensively, the Lions will also have to keep an eye on a pair of Big Red wingmen: junior Lenny Collins (14.7 points per game) and senior Cody Toppert (12.4 points per game), Cornell’s two leading scorers. Toppert, a streaky lefty, has proven difficult for the Lions to cover in the past.

“I don’t know if [his being left-handed] makes it harder; as a player, you have to make an adjustment,” Jones said. “There aren’t lefties on our team, so we don’t go up against one in practice, and it makes him more difficult to guard off the dribble. It’s just a little different guarding them on the perimeter.”

The first two games of the conference season can be perplexing for some of the League’s coaches, as travel partners face one another twice in a week’s time, leaving little time for adjustments or new scouting. Despite the short turnaround, Jones is confident he and his staff will have little trouble preparing a game plan.

“It’s just different in the fact that it’s just a recent game,” Jones said. “There’s going to be adjustments, just as if we were playing them two weeks after playing them for the first time. There’s a lot of familiarity, and there’s not a lot you can change in a week’s time, and that’s the real difference.”

The Lions certainly enter the game on a surge, and are beginning to garner some national attention. A number of commentators on espn.com have written about the Lions in recent months, and Jones himself appeared on the ESPN talk show “Cold Pizza” over winter break. Both instances are perhaps a sign that Columbia’s success is beginning to have an impact outside of campus.

“It’s great for the program—for us to appear on ESPN and have me on to air clips of our games, it says a lot about our program, and what the older guys have done,” Jones said. “I think they deserve most of the credit for what’s transpired while I’ve been here. They persevered, stayed together, and now they’re seeing the fruits of their hard work. Any notoriety that I’ve received personally, they deserve the credit for it.”