Jones Has Team Moving in the Right Direction

There were no excuses, and there was no finger pointing. No one from Columbia disguised their frustration at their performance after Saturday's debacle. From the head coach to the players, the palpable disgust with the team's blowout loss to the defending Ivy champions was abundantly clear.

"I felt that we broke off our offense way too early, and we just weren't prepared to play," head coach Joe Jones said. "We weren't mentally prepared the way we needed to play this game. We broke off the offense way too early, and then when we did miss shots, it just led to quick baskets for [Penn]."

The Lions were just coming off their second consecutive home victory over perennial Ivy power Princeton, but they had a number of things break against them while playing the Quakers. They couldn't buy a bucket all day long, as they shot under 30 percent from the floor and even missed a number of wide-open layups. It would have been easy to walk away from the weekend happy with a split in a pair of so-called home games that, due to scheduling, ended up feeling more like road games.

It's because the stakes have been raised. It's only two games into the season, and after a sweep of these two teams last year still resulted in a last place finish, everyone realized that the 14-game tournament supersedes any individual weekend.

"I told our guys, 'Last year we beat Penn and Princeton. Did it matter?'" Jones said. "At the end of the year, we were 4-10. That's all people care about. You've got to win your games. You've got to take them one game at a time. It can't matter who your opponent is."

Jones has Columbia's basketball program moving in the right direction. There's no doubt that the talent level of this year's squad is finally high enough to finish toward the top of the league. Ben Nwachukwu and John Baumann give the Lions one of the best frontcourts in the league. They are complemented by Patrick Foley and Niko Scott who have had tremendous freshman seasons, and finally gave Columbia basketball guards who can create in the lane and deliver crisp entry passes into the post.

The team's defense has also improved. Often, defense is a product of experience, and as the team has started to mature, the defensive struggles of the past few seasons have started to turn into a strength rather than a weakness. Mixing in a steady dose of zone, the Lions have confused opponents into taking lower-percentage shots deeper into possessions. And it showed against Princeton, where the Lions had no problem shutting down the Tigers' backdoor cuts