ESPN Men's Basketball

The race for the Ivy League title and the automatic NCAA tournament berth that comes with it is getting attention this week, with Princeton clinging onto first place and Harvard challenging for its first Ivy League title in program history.

Princeton and Harvard face off on Saturday, and with two wins this week the Crimson can force a one-game playoff with the Tigers. It's all exciting stuff in the absence of a conference tournament, but Ivy League executive director Robin Harris told the USA Today that the conversation shouldn't end there.

"We think the team that doesn't win the league deserves consideration," says Harris. "The trend in the Ivy is that the overall level of competitiveness is increasing. We don't think this is pie-in-the-sky. I think we have a realistic chance, and certainly the two should be in the conversation."

The Ivy League getting multiple bids has never happened before, not even last year when Cornell ended up going to the Sweet 16 and Harvard even with a future NBA player in Jeremy Lin just didn't have a good enough résumé.

This year's Crimson team under Tommy Amaker doesn't want to leave it in the hands of the selection committee, of course.

From the New York Times:

Harvard's Rating Percentage Index ranking in the most recent N.C.A.A. release was 44th, highest in the Ivy League.

With one victory this weekend, Harvard will establish a program record for most victories in a season. With two, it will establish a program record for most league wins (12) in a season.

"We've had a vision to have the opportunity to create something to be worthy of the brand of Harvard," Amaker said.

Harvard sophomore forward Kyle Casey, the team's leading returning scorer and rebounder, suffered a broken foot during a pickup game with teammates and is expected to miss six to eight weeks recovering from surgery, according to the Harvard Crimson.

"I got the ball and made a hard cut going to the rim," Casey said. "I felt a pop, and I fell."

...

"It could have been worse, so I'm just trying to stay optimistic, but it's pretty bad news for myself and my team," Casey said.

The timetable will make it difficult for the Ivy League's Rookie of the Year to return for Harvard's Nov. 13 season opener at George Mason, but gives him time to recover before the conference schedule.

That's significant since it's the Ivy League regular-season champ that advances automatically to the NCAA tournament, and the Crimson coming off a 21-win season, should be contenders once again.

Casey averaged 10.4 points per games last season, which was second only to NBA-bound Jeremy Lin.

San Francisco coach Rex Walters has yet to meet Jeremy Lin, but wants to extend an invitation to the presumed newest member of their small fraternity -- Asian-Americans who have played in the NBA.

When Lin is in the neighborhood and wants to work out away from the Golden State Warriors practice facility, Walters would like to have the USF gym doors opened for him.

What's a little red-carpet treatment for a kid who was shut out from receiving a Division I scholarship? And Walters, who starred at Kansas and played seven seasons in the NBA, as much as anyone else appreciates how Lin can be an inspirational figure for Asian-American players.

"I don't look Japanese," Walters said, referring to his mother's heritage. "When they see him, it's an Asian-American.

"It's great for Asian-Americans. And he's not 7-foot-4. It's great to see that they can make it."

Walters does his part to inspire as well. In the spare time he has away from rebuilding a Dons program that captured national championships in the 1950s, he also coaches his son and the rest of the fifth grade boys who play for the SF Flying Eagles -- an Asian league team.

Walters grew up in San Jose playing for Asian league teams himself and looks forward to following Lin's stereotype-shattering career. With few Asian-Americans playing college basketball, let alone reaching the NBA, the story of how a Harvard graduate with Taiwanese parents made the league could be a game-changer.

"You can't believe the detractors," Walters said. "They have to get over the stereotype that they can't make it."

Jeremy Lin is breaking all sorts of NBA-related barriers. He's an Asian-American, for one, and Asian-Americans are all too rare in college hoops, let alone in the NBA. But there's also the little matter of Lin's former college, Harvard, which (as you know) is an Ivy League institution. The Ivy League is not exactly an NBA talent scout's first stop.

Per the Wall Street Journal, Lin's contract with the Golden State Warriors means his former league is off the schneid. Among the 20 conferences that competed in this year's NCAA tournament, only the Ivy League and the Atlantic Sun had failed to produce an NBA player since 2005. Now the Atlantic Sun stands alone.

Naturally, the A-Sun and the Ivy aren't the only conferences that have struggled to produce NBA talent in the past five years. The Dagger has a list of other conferences which have struggled to send players to the next level, conferences like the America East, Big South, Northeast, Patriot League, and the Summit League, which boast one player since 2005 each. The SWAC, MAAC, MEAC, and Southland conferences have each produced two. Compared to those paltry (but entirely unsurprising) tallies, the Big Ten looks downright loaded.

Jeremy Lin was a feel-good story during his career at Harvard. And as if being an Asian-American college basketball star out of the Ivy League wasn't intriguing enough, on Wednesday the Bay Area native signed a contract with the Golden State Warriors, his hometown NBA team.

Lin went undrafted, but after strong NBA summer league performances and after holding his own against top-pick John Wall, the 6-foot-3 guard is on the verge of becoming the first Harvard player to appear in an NBA game since Ed Smith played in 11 games during the 1953-54 season.

In an interview today with Warriors broadcaster Tim Roye, Lin spoke of how his memorable 30-point game against UConn gave him the confidence it took to make it to the NBA.

"Just to realize I can play at this level and I can hang with some of these guys they're projecting to be in the first round, second round.

"Coach [Jim] Calhoun had some really nice words for me after the game, and I was blown away by that. When I read that, I was in shock for a while. I couldn’t believe he said some of the things he said.

"Obviously, coach [Tommy] Amaker and coach [Kenny] Blakeney, they believed in me for a very long time. They’ve been saying those things for a while."

The story gets even better for Lin. Being underappreciated and not getting drafted in June actually helped create a market for him. A fact that wasn't lost on former Cornell player and Ivy League foe Jon Jaques.

According to Marc Stein of ESPN.com, that meant getting more than half of his first-year salary guaranteed when some second-round picks aren't guaranteed anything.

So when Lin suits up during the exhibition season in front of a Bay Area crowd -- as he did earlier this year against Santa Clara -- and soaks in the cheers, remember the long odds it takes college basketball players to reach that level.

Every once in awhile, someone with even longer odds gets there and makes a believer out of you all over again.

"I feel like an Asian from Harvard… if you think about that, you're not going to think, 'Oh, a player in the NBA.' I understand that. That's just the way it is," Lin told reporters.

"There haven't been that many Asian-Americans. There haven't been that many Ivy Leaguers. So… I understand that. But I'm hoping I'm breaking the stereotypes."

Harvard's Jeremy Lin is currently in second place with 27 percent of the fan voting for the Bob Cousy Award, which is given to the nation's top point guard. That trails only John Wall's 36.8 percent.

The month-long voting process began Friday, with the point guard who receives the most fan votes getting one vote toward the final committee vote.

Besides Wall and Lin, there nine other finalists:

Matt Bouldin -- Gonzaga
Sherron Collins -- Kansas
Devan Downey -- South Carolina
Trevon Hughes – Wisconsin
Kalin Lucas -- Michigan State
Ronald Moore -- Siena
Scottie Reynolds -- Villanova
Jon Scheyer -- Duke
Greivis Vasquez -- Maryland

Who you got?

To send me your links, hit me up on Twitter. Onward:

• Coach K has been thinning his rotation in recent weeks. Freshmen Mason Plumlee and Andre Dawkins aren't logging nearly as many minutes as they did before the season. What does it all mean? Well, it means Duke's big three -- Jon Scheyer, Kyle Singler, and Nolan Smith -- are stuck playing more minutes than before, which could, theoretically, lead to some fatigue. (This was not a difficult equation to figure.) It could also mean nothing: Fretting about Duke's rotation is nothing new, and the aforementioned big three are highly conditioned athletes in their early 20s with years of college hoops experience under their respective belts. Does Duke really need to be deep? The lads at Duke Basketball Report seem unconvinced.
• Mike DeCourcy looks at historical trends and current lineups and figures out who has the right combination of pro talent, post scoring, guard play and coaching to make a legitimate run at the national title. There are few surprises in the offing, but it's an interesting way to whittle the wheat from the chaff.
• SI's Pablo S. Torre wrote about Harvard's hoops resurgence in this week's Sports Illustrated. Torre went to Harvard, and this led New York Times writer Pete Thamel to question the veracity of Torre's story, leading to a totally awesome and unexpected Twitter spat between the two. (Thamel said he was merely reminding folks that Torre gave a "warm fuzzy hug to his alma mater." Uh, thanks?) Anyone following both on Twitter felt a little like a child watching his parents fight. No! Stop it! Stop yelling at each other! Don't question Mommy's journalistic integrity! Something like that, anyway.
• SB Nation's Blogger Power Rankings have Kansas on top of Syracuse, but only by a smidge. Will it be the same after the weekend?
• UNC-Wilmington coach Benny Moss resigns. This may or may not have had something to do with Wednesday's 40-point loss to Hofstra.
• Rush The Court opines on the latest college basketball hoops phenomenon ... rushing the court. Like everyone else in the world (including yours truly), RTC is shocked and appalled at the behavior of you darned college kids, with your MySpaces and your Nintendo. Stop it, already! Get off my lawn!
• A breakdown of the Mountain West's bubble. At-large teams, ahoy.
• In honor of former N.C. State women's coach Kay Yow, Oregon wore some delightfully tacky white and pink uniforms on Thursday night. Yow's logo was stiched on the uniforms as well. And, to be honest, these unis are not all that bad. (Not that it would matter if they were; aesthetics are beside the point here.) I'm being serious. Oregon takes its fair share of guff for its ugly uniform combinations, but, much like BYU's uniforms for Saturday, these unis pass muster.
• Indy Star reporter Terry Hutchens does a few man-on-the-street interviews with Indiana fans to gauge what he calls a "hint of dissatisfaction" among Indiana fans with coach Tom Crean. (For more on this weird phenomenon, go here.) Most of those interviewed remain pretty positive, though there is the obligatory "this coach doesn't run motion offense like Coach Knight" quote: "I like the enthusiasm of Tom Crean, but I have to say I am not impressed by his coaching style," [1978 grad Bruce] Kinsey said. "I see a lack of motion, picks and screens, and movement without the basketball." For those who didn't know, in Indiana, there is only one way to play offense, and that is the same way the Hoosiers played it in 1976. Ignore 30 years of basketball theory. Ignore the success Kentucky coach John Calipari has had playing a dribble-drive system. Just set screens! It's that simple!
• Kyle Whelliston spends the night in the Palestra, hears voices, lives to tell the tale.
• Using the power of statistics and projections, Buster Sports breaks down what would happen if Kentucky played the New Jersey Nets right now. Spoiler alert: The Nets win. Let's assume Buster didn't run the numbers for Kansas because the same result would happen. Though it might be a bit closer.
• Wisconsin's Jon Leuer's wrist is improving, but no one is saying when he'll be back -- only that he won't be ready in a week. That precludes an appearance in the Badgers' lineup for a showdown with Michigan State Tuesday.

The Associated Press has a story today on the Dartmouth program and newly appointed interim coach Mark Graupe, who took over yesterday after Terry Dunn resigned last week.

Graupe served last season as video coordinator at Colorado State and now finds himself taking over a team best known for two players who formed a conservative rap group and call themselves "The Young Cons."

The Big Green is 3-11 this year, most recently losing by 29 to Harvard. The game attracted media attention not because it was the team's first game playing without Dunn, but because Harvard's Jeremy Lin was in action. Here's a Taiwanese news report from the game of Lin that also includes footage of forward Josh Riddle, one of the Young Cons, in action.

SANTA CLARA, Calif. -- Gie-Ming and Shirley Lin sat in the front row behind the Harvard bench, and to support their son, they proudly wore T-shirts that on the back read, "Welcome to the Jeremy Lin Show."

The print on the front of the shirts screamed a more powerful message:

WE BELIEVE

In the corner of the sold-out arena, 16-year-old Austin Ng was starting to do just that while leaning over the concourse-level railing alongside his parents. He was getting a glimpse of a stereotype being shattered.

An Asian-American basketball star?

The family had snapped up discounted tickets for $8.88 apiece and made the hour-long drive from San Francisco -- not to see Santa Clara in nonconference action, but to be mesmerized by Lin's every movement.

"It gives me inspiration," said Ng, who recently got cut by his high school team, but continues to play basketball for an Asian-American club team called the Dragons. "If he can do it, why not me?"

Playing about 15 miles from his hometown of Palo Alto, Calif., Lin's presence resulted in a capacity crowd at the 4,700-seat Leavey Center that included only a handful of his family members and droves of Asian-Americans wanting to witness his homecoming. The 6-foot-3 senior, averaging 17.4 ppg for the 11-3 Crimson, said he didn't pay attention to it until his teammates told him, "it was like Hong Kong."

Jeremy Lin fanatic Brian Yang, wearing a Bruce Lee shirt, beamed at the sight. The 36-year-old helps run an Asian-American basketball league and also assisted in coordinating the effort by the Dream League to pack the stands with Asian-Americans.

The Dream League, a Bay Area community service organization dedicated to the advancement of Asian-American basketball players, purchased about 500 tickets from Santa Clara and offered to resell them at lower prices in order to encourage members of the community to watch Lin play. Why charge $8.88 for general admission tickets? The No. 8 in Chinese culture is a lucky one.

To see the rest of the story on Lin's Bay Area homecoming, click here.

Santa Clara is expecting to sell out the 4,500-seat Leavey Center for its game tonight, with whatever remaining tickets available being snapped up this morning.

That's because Harvard is in town.

Yes, it's going to be somewhat of a circus tonight when Harvard guard Jeremy Lin plays in front of a hometown crowd that is expected to include a big Asian American presence in the stands and on press row.

The former Palo Alto (Calif.) High star has made a name for himself with a fallaway buzzer beater against William & Mary, a 30-point performance against Connecticut, and 25 more in an upset of Boston College.

On Saturday against Seattle, Lin scored a game-high 21 points, topping NBA prospect Charles Garcia, who is the NCAA's leading scorer per 40 minutes.

Harvard is off to a 10-3 start and is out looking for respect, as evidenced by the Seattle game recap on the Crimson's Web site, which notes a two-month-old shot at Harvard taken by a Seattle online magazine.

Respect is what Lin is getting more and more of these days, as Dana O'Neil recently wrote.

I attended Boston College's 61-60 win over Miami on Sunday and you can find my write-up on that game in Monday's Daily Word. For now, here are some thoughts on the other action from today:

• A player that continues to be overlooked nationally: Jeremy Lin of Harvard. All he did was go for a career-high 30 points, nine rebounds and three assists in a 79-73 loss at Connecticut. The race between Cornell’s Ryan Wittman and Lin for Ivy League player of the year will be quite a chase.
• Speaking of Cornell, the Big Red beat Saint Joseph's by 12 on Sunday. That means Cornell now has wins at Alabama (SEC), at UMass (A-10), at Drexel (CAA) and over St. Joe’s (A-10), all higher-rated conferences than the Ivy.
• UCLA gave Kansas a game, Reeves Nelson got a shiner and the Bruins at least showed they have grit in the 73-61 loss to the top-ranked Jayhawks at Pauley Pavilion.
• Was there another team that needed a win more than Clemson? The Tigers had to beat a Dominique Archie-less South Carolina team after blowing a 23-point lead to Illinois. They did just that, winning 72-61 and beating their rival for the sixth straight time.
• The Gamecocks are now essentially 2-2 without Archie, who was hurt early in the loss to Miami in the Charleston Classic. South Carolina has two tough games upcoming, against Richmond and at pesky Wofford before a Dec. 30 date at Boston College.
• After returning from a stress reaction in his right tibia, UCLA’s Tyler Honeycutt played for the first time and registered 19 minutes against Kansas. He was just 1-of-6 from the field for three points. Obviously it’s hard to have your first game against KU, but the Bruins will need more out of him. In the first post-Drew Gordon game for UCLA, the inside players -- Reeves Nelson, James Keefe, Brendan Lane and J’mison Morgan -- combined for 13 points.
• Notre Dame desperately needs Tim Abromaitis to break out as a scorer to compliment Luke Harangody. The Irish got that Sunday when Abromaitis scored 31 points with Harangody scoring 29 in the Irish’s 90-72 win over Central Florida.
• Tulsa avoided a major letdown after beating Oklahoma State by squeaking out an 81-80 win over Ohio.
• Don’t sleep on Virginia Tech’s Malcolm Delaney as a first-team all-ACC player. He lit up Georgia for 31 points in a 74-62 victory in Blacksburg. Delaney is the ACC’s leading scorer at 21.2 points a game. Virginia Tech may not finish in the top five, but Delaney will be a consistent scorer this season.
• At 2-4, Creighton had been struggling quite a bit, albeit against a tough schedule. That’s why Sunday’s 67-61 win over in-state rival Nebraska was much-needed. Kenny Lawson scored 25 points and grabbed 10 boards in a victory that will potentially jump-start the Bluejays.
• Arizona falling to Oklahoma 79-62 after losing to UNLV, Vanderbilt and Wisconsin means the Wildcats have few chances for power-rating points remaining. The Wildcats, trying to extend their NCAA-tournament streak to 26, still play at San Diego State and host NC State and BYU, with the Cougars possibly the only NCAA-tourney team in the bunch.
• Give credit to Villanova for going into a pro-Maryland Verizon Center in D.C. and gutting out a 95-86 win on Sunday night. But one has to wonder if this isn't the exact same Terrapins from a year ago -- a team that will have to grind for just about every win it can get in order to squeeze out an NCAA tournament bid. It would help if Greivis Vasquez re-discovered his shooting touch. Maryland's star is shooting just 32 percent from the field on the season (28 percent from 3) and was just 3-of-9 against the Wildcats. He also piled up a season-high seven turnovers.

STORRS, Conn. -- No one in the commonwealth of Kentucky will be shaking in their boots when they see this score out of Connecticut -- UConn 79, Harvard 73.

Understandably.

While UK dispatched of North Carolina in its warm-up to Thursday's SEC-Big East showdown with Connecticut, the Huskies looked less than dominant, allowing Harvard to hang around and snip away at a 16-point lead. The Crimson trailed by just five with a minute left as Connecticut clanked at the free-throw line. The Huskies were 26-of-40 from the charity stripe.

But I'll go out on a limb and say that the UConn team that comes to New York on Wednesday night will play a little more inspired than the one that showed up in Storrs on Sunday afternoon. This game lacked a lot in muscle power for the Huskies, but it did allow Jim Calhoun to roll in many of the reserves from his deep bench, guys he'll need against the quick and talented Wildcats.

OK, not much to take solace in, but it's something for a team still under construction in the half-court offense. The Huskies are in dire need of an outside shooting threat. Kemba Walker's shot is much improved, but he's still far more effective going to the rim.

It's also unfair to lay all of the blame on Connecticut without giving any of the credit to Harvard. Tommy Amaker's team plays hard, but also plays smart. Harvard players repeatedly passed up decent looks to make the extra pass for a guy with a better look. Junior Jeremy Lin is fearless in the lane and a legit playmaker, drawing so much attention as the Crimson's legit threat that he attracts a crowd, opening up his teammates for easy buckets. He finished with 30 points and nine rebounds, and for at least this game, was by far the best player on the court.

Don't be surprised to see Harvard give frontrunner Cornell a run for its money in the hunt for the Ivy League's lone NCAA tourney bid.