Bears Stifle Light Blue, but Bulldogs Fall to a Prepared Team

Seventeen minutes into the men’s basketball team’s second game against Brown, it looked like Columbia was on its way to a fifth straight win and a tie for second place. Twenty-three minutes later, dismantled once again by Brown, 67-52, it was more a question of whether the Lions could recover the following night against Yale. They did, giving Joe Jones his first sweep of his brother James, 68-62.

Friday’s game was disappointingly similar to the Columbia’s first meeting with Brown. Niko Scott’s hot shooting pushed Columbia to a nine-point lead with just under two minutes left in the first half. Following a traveling call on an Asenso Ampim dunk, the team began to unravel. Brown scored five points in the last minute of the first half, including a three-pointer to beat the buzzer, and Columbia went into the break with a narrow 33-29 lead.

It all fell apart in the second period. Brown scored the first 13 points of the second half, and a stifling 1-3-1 zone kept the Lions off the board for the first 8:26 of the second half.

“As well as we played in the first 17 minutes of the game, we played that bad for the next 23,” Jones said. “We had a great 17 and then a terrible 23—and that’s really the game.”

Down by five with a little under 11 minutes left, Columbia was still in the game. Two quick Brown threes stretched the lead out to 11, and with five minutes left, the Bears were up by 18. Columbia could never find an offensive rhythm, shooting 27.6 percent in the half, and wasting a career high 25 points from Scott.

“The issue was that Brown came out in the second half—they changed their defense,” Jones said. “We didn’t respond well, they made some changes on the offensive end, we didn’t recover well—that was really the game.”

John Baumann, Columbia’s leading scorer, was kept in single digits for only the second time in the Ivy season. Baumann was denied entry passes and could not find his way to the line, attempting only three free throws.

“They did a great job on John of crowding him, but we didn’t do a good job of finding the open area,” Jones said.

The next night, with Baumann back to form on 25 points and nine rebounds, it was Columbia making the second half run. Yale had a narrow 33-32 lead at the half, and stretched the lead to five in the opening minutes of the second half, but the Lions would go on a 20-4 run to go up 57-46. Yale would cut the lead back down to three, but never closer.

Ampim had a breakthrough performance with 16 points, including four dunks and seven rebounds. Columbia rebounded from its poor shooting performance on Friday to finish at 48 percent from the field.

The Lions play their final games at home this coming weekend, facing Harvard and Dartmouth.