Can Princeton run the table in the Ivy? It comes down to depth

This surprising stat could come back to haunt a very good Tigers team.

From left to right, Matt Allocco, Caden Pierce and Mitch Henderson speak with the media after a win on Dec. 2, 2023. (Photo by Adam Zielonka)

PRINCETON – They beat Dartmouth 76-58. No one was surprised.

OK, I shouldn’t be that dismissive of Princeton’s second Ivy League game of the season Monday, and for a few reasons. For one, Dartmouth may be 4-11, but I came away feeling like the Big Green have some good pieces, particularly Brandon Mitchell-Day and Izaiah Robinson, the latter a Montclair native who had a career-high 13 points.

We should also talk about how Princeton won. The Tigers opened the game with a scoring burst to set a 25-10 lead less than eight minutes in. I started calculating how soon Princeton might get to 100, but Dartmouth proceeded to hang within 11-13 points nearly the entire rest of the way. There would be very little garbage time to burn off, unlike in the Harvard blowout; the starters did not begin to sub out until the last three minutes.

This is league play. Teams of every stripe love to commend their own conference as the best in the country, or if not the best, the toughest, which carries a slightly different subtext. It feels like every single game in the MAAC is decided by six points or fewer, for example. But that parity is not unique to one region. When you get to league play, everyone knows everyone else’s strengths, weaknesses, tendencies, travel schedules and what they like to have for dinner. It makes it enormously difficult to run the table.

Matt Allocco said the Tigers are “absolutely” ready to play four straight Ivy games on the road with a target on their backs as the defending champs.

“And I think we’ve done that pretty well this whole year,” Allocco said. “Our first stretch, we had a lot of games on the road and we played well for the most part, so we’re gonna try and keep that going obviously.”

So let’s do a hard pivot here to discuss the stakes. It would take a collapse of unreal proportions for this Princeton team not to qualify for Ivy Madness. But if you missed last Tuesday’s edition of Guarden State, covering bracketology and each New Jersey team’s chase for the NCAA Tournament, Princeton might build a resume worthy of an at-large bid even if it doesn’t win the conference title. A few days later, it turned out that ESPN bracketologist Joe Lunardi agreed.