With one week left to play, everything is in place for the men's basketball team to return as the second seed in the NESCAC Tournament.
After falling to Middlebury Friday night, Tufts notched one of its biggest wins of the season on Saturday, pulling out an impressive 82-65 road victory over the Williams Ephs.
The win gives Tufts (13-8, 4-3 NESCAC) the head-to-head tiebreaker advantage over Williams (11-11, 4-3 NESCAC), which will prove vital down the stretch as both teams aim for a 6-3 finish to their conference schedules.
"That was a really, really big win for us," senior co-captain Brian Fitzgerald said. "A huge win."
Though the Ephs came into Saturday's match-up as one of the lowest scoring teams in the league - they shoot just 39.3 percent on field goals and average 68.0 points a contest, stats which rank last and second to last in the NESCAC respectively - they showed a different side in the first half against Tufts. Williams shot 50 percent from the field in the half, and buried seven three-pointers.
"More than half their shots are threes," senior co-captain Dave Shepherd said. "For that reason, when they get it going, they are really tough to stop."
Junior point guard Chris Shalvoy led the hot-shooting Ephs in the first frame, scoring 11 points, including three three-pointers, and dishing out six assists. With 1:30 to play in the first half, Williams had its largest lead of the night, at 42-30.
"They play an offense where they run three guards around the perimeter," senior tri-captain Brian Kumf said. "Everybody is just chucking the whole time."
Despite the Ephs' early lead, the Jumbos stole the momentum right before halftime. Junior forward Jake Weitzen grabbed an offensive rebound off of a missed three-pointer and made the putback to cut the lead to ten with 30 seconds left. Sophomore forward Jon Pierce promptly forced a turnover near midcourt with just seconds remaining in the half. Pierce then took the inbound pass, took one dribble past halfcourt, and drained a 30-footer at the buzzer, shrinking Williams' halftime lead to 42-35.
"That was huge," Shepherd said. "There's a big difference between going into halftime down 12 and going in down seven."
Tufts came out of the locker room possessed, and within four minutes of the start of the second half, the Jumbos had seized the lead, 50-47, after a three-pointer by Weitzen.
Tufts never looked back, holding Williams to just 23 points in the second half on 30 percent shooting. Junior guard Ryan O'Keefe harried the Ephs' star junior Chris Rose, who scored nine points and had seven rebounds in the first period, into two of seven shooting in the second.
"I think that we're a better team than [Williams], and we shifted into a higher gear at halftime," Shepherd said. "We locked them down for possession after possession in the first few minutes."
"We played great team defense," Kumf added. "Ryan did a great job on Rose, and he's a stud for them."
The Jumbos owned the backboards on Saturday, outrebounding Williams 46-28, including 21 offensive rebounds. Kumf, who scored 19 points and pulled down seven boards, was instrumental in contributing to the rebounding advantage.
"That's the best I've seen Kumfy play in the four years I've played with him," Fitzgerald said. "He was phenomenal this weekend. And Pierce, Jake, myself - we all hit the glass hard in the second half."
On Friday, fans who turned out to see Middlebury play Tufts were treated to an entertaining 40 minutes of basketball. The two offensive juggernauts - Middlebury entered the contest averaging 84.6 points a game, a mark that topped the league, and Tufts was on the Panthers' heels at 82.3 points per game - combined to score nearly 200 points and attempt 75 free throws in the Panthers' 102-91 victory.
Senior forward Evan Thompson poured in a career-high 35 points on 11 of 14 shooting to spearhead Middlebury's winning effort. Thompson, who stands 6'6", overwhelmed Jumbo defenders with his size in the post and also punished them at the free throw line, converting 12 of his 13 attempts. As a team, the Panthers topped the 100-point mark for the fifth time this season and shot nearly 53 percent from the field.
For Tufts, Kumf scored a career-high 26 points and pulled down 10 rebounds in the loss. Pierce added 21 points and seven rebounds, and O'Keefe chipped in 18 points.
"It was a very high-energy game," Shepherd said. "We played as hard as we've played all season, but we just didn't play that smart."
Despite the frenzied pace of the game, the Jumbos only finished with 13 assists, below their season average of over 17 per game. More harmful than the lack of ball movement, however, was Tufts' near-complete inability to connect from three-point range, particularly in the second half. The team sunk just one of 13 second-half attempts and shot 26.3 percent for the game. After finishing in the top half of the league in three-point shooting last season, the team has slid from second to ninth, converting just 33 percent of its attempts.
Even with the loss to Middlebury, the Jumbos still essentially control their own destiny for the No. 2 seed in the NESCAC Tournament, which starts on Feb. 17. If the Jumbos can beat Bowdoin and Colby this weekend, and Trinity (6-2 NESCAC) loses its remaining game against Amherst, the nation's top-ranked team, the Jumbos will have the tiebreaker over Trinity and Williams.
The Jumbos are once again vying for another showdown with the top-seeded Lord Jeffs, who are presently sitting on a perfect 23-0 record.
"There's nothing that anybody on this team wants more than another shot at Amherst," Fitzgerald said.
