With disruptive defense, Princeton women maintain a tradition of excellence
This might be the chief reason the Tigers haven’t lost a league game during Carla Berube’s tenure.
PRINCETON – The men’s basketball program at Princeton University abides by a straightforward motto: “Make Shots.” It appears on TV monitors around the facility and even features in the title of a podcast with head coach Mitch Henderson.
The Princeton women’s team has a motto, too, and it’s just as fitting: “Get Stops.”
Senior Abby Meyers said the whole team had discussions to offer up ideas, but assistant coach Lauren Dillon came up with the “winning” concept, one that just happened to parallel the men’s.
“We weren’t even thinking what the men are doing. That’s who we are,” head coach Carla Berube said Saturday. “That’s what we hang our hat on – defense. What we want to be great at.”
Rest assured, Berube was pleased with her team’s effort on that end of the floor. The Tigers held Yale to 36 points one day after limiting Brown to 42. As Princeton rose to 11-0 in the Ivy League and 19-4 overall, its scoring defense improved to a cool 50.0 points per game for the season, third-best in Division I.
It’s perhaps the chief reason Princeton hasn’t lost a league game during Berube’s tenure, making it the favorite to win the Ivy and appear in its ninth NCAA Tournament since 2010.
The Tigers’ brand of defense is passionate and aggressive. In Saturday’s 74-36 win, they forced the Bulldogs into 25 turnovers, including 13 steals – 12 by the end of the third quarter. Grace Stone was credited for three steals, but she might have forced three more just by getting her hand on passes into the post.
Princeton scored a whopping 31 points off turnovers and outscored Yale 12-0 in fast-break points.
“The new coaching staff really brought in a mentality of defense, getting stops, because at the end of the day that transitions to the offense,” Meyers said. “Just taking pride in that one-on-one defense, don’t let the player get by you, because at the end of the day, defense wins games.
“It’s giving us that personal confidence to be our best every day in practice and in games.”
Berube took over this program in 2019 after Courtney Banghart earned the head coaching job at North Carolina. A forward on Geno Auriemma’s first national title team at Connecticut, Berube later spent most of two decades coaching Division III Tufts.
That was where Berube began to form her defense-first coaching identity.
“We didn’t have a lot of time to get ready for the season,” Berube said. “We only had two weeks of practice. It was like, we have to get good at something. Offense is always a work in progress, it takes time and chemistry, but defensively it’s just heart and hustle and communication. That’s a really big piece.
“I think they love it,” she added of her Princeton players. “They can see what it does to teams when you play really hard on that end of the floor.”
What it does is make a competent team miserable. The Bulldogs were no slouches – they entered Saturday third in the Ivy, and in their first meeting in January they only lost to Princeton by 12, the Tigers’ narrowest margin of victory in league play. Yet across the second and third quarters, Yale shot a meager 5-for-24.
This stellar defense isn’t new. In 2019-20, Princeton led Division I at 47.9 ppg allowed and ranked seventh in field goal percentage allowed (33.8%), 10th in turnover margin (6.74) and 17th in steals per game (10.7). After a lost season due to COVID-19, and without many of the stars from the 2019-20 roster, the Tigers are keeping it up: 35.4% shooting allowed (ranking 17th), plus-6.13 on turnovers (11th) and 10.6 steals per contest (27th).
Berube’s first season at Princeton, though a rousing success, ended with a thud when March Madness was canceled at the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. That 26-1 team could not test its mettle in the postseason. Players like Bella Alaire (the future fifth overall WNBA draft pick who had 2.3 blocks and 1.2 steals per game as a senior), Carlie Littlefield (talented enough to follow Banghart to North Carolina) and Taylor Baur left Princeton without getting that last shot.
“We used to, during our pregame speech, have the number up on the board – 600-something days since we last played a college game – and then we kept on adding,” Meyers said. “We’re just trying to continue the legacy that prior players have instilled in Princeton women’s basketball, in the program.”
This year’s group leans on Meyers as its leading scorer and senior leader, a role she treats with the highest regard.
“It’s special, and I definitely don’t take it for granted,” Meyers said. “It’s my last year, so what I’m trying to do is just play my hardest every game and ensure us a dub at the end of it. It’s a team game and I just want to be that senior, that leader that the team needs. Especially later on, it’s gonna help in the postseason.”
The Tigers return to the court Wednesday at second-place Columbia, which is having a terrific season in its own right with a 10-1 league record. Is it possible Princeton absorbs its first loss since December? Entirely. But with a deep roster, great shooters and a defense built for March, we just as easily could be talking about Princeton running the table once again.
“I wanted this job because it was a winning program and I wanted to be part of another winning program,” Berube said. “From afar, you know about Princeton basketball and you know how many great teams they’ve had in the past. I just wanted to sustain that but keep building too. I think it’s just been really important to show our alumni how important they are to our success. They helped build the things that we’re able to do now.”
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As always, thanks for reading. I’d been meaning to see some women’s ball this season, and there’s no excuse not to give this high-flying Princeton team some of the spotlight. Now let’s turn our attention to the weekend that was in men’s hoops and clean the glass:
So Rutgers didn’t finish 5-0 in its five-game stretch against the best teams in the Big Ten. It’s fine. Something tells me the Scarlet Knights will happily take 4-1. As they came back from 20 points down early in the second half to keep it respectable against Purdue, you could see that intangible attribute they’ve fostered of never truly being out of a game. Either way, Sunday’s 84-72 loss really won’t hurt Rutgers’ tournament hopes because of the many other Quad 1 wins it has built up now. It just can’t afford a slip-up to a lesser foe as the season winds down.
The AP Top 25 voters don’t sit on the selection committee, but they do believe in Rutgers. They garnered 35 votes this week after one handy win over Illinois and the road loss to Purdue. That’s up from 10 a week ago, and good for second in the “Others receiving votes” category. It’s a Big Ten logjam: Iowa is now ranked No. 25 at 59 votes, beating out Michigan State by exactly one vote.
Seton Hall was too slow and stagnant on offense in the first half of its eventual 66-64 win over DePaul on Saturday night. DePaul missed 17 of its first 18 shots of the game, yet the Pirates couldn’t capitalize enough and only led by 12 points early on. Argue with the calls all you want, but they took too many fouls, which easily let DePaul back in once its best player caught on fire. Hall should feel lucky to have pulled that win out; now it needs to sweep its final two home games, vs. Butler and Georgetown, to avoid serious bubble concerns.
Juwan Howard thoroughly embarrassed himself, his players and Michigan athletics in yesterday’s postgame tussle. After the two sides had begun to separate, he went back in for a swing at a Wisconsin assistant coach – and he showed absolutely no regret afterward. Greg Gard probably deserves some brief suspension himself, depending on what it turns out he said to “instigate” matters. But Howard’s needs to be longer, ideally the remainder of the season and postseason. The Wolverines’ next game is Wednesday at home against Rutgers, so we’ll be keeping an eye on this.
League power rankings
Big Ten
1. Purdue
2. Illinois
3. Wisconsin
4. Ohio State
5. Rutgers
6. Michigan State
T7. Iowa
T7. Michigan
9. Penn State
10. Indiana
11. Northwestern
12. Maryland
13. Minnesota
14. Nebraska
Purdue has won nine of 10, owns a sweep of Illinois and is the only team not to lose to Rutgers during the Scarlet Knights’ Top 25 heater. As you could see Sunday, when the Boilermakers are on, they’re on, and look like one of the best six or so teams in the country. The group in the middle of this league is getting more cluttered; The Athletic’s most recent bracket projection had Rutgers and Michigan and Iowa and Indiana making the tournament for another nine-team Big Ten entry, which I don’t see happening this year. If they get more than seven at this rate, I’d be impressed, especially since Michigan is going to have to play without Howard for some length of time against difficult competition down the stretch.
Big East
1. Villanova
2. Providence
3. UConn
4. Creighton
5. Marquette
6. Seton Hall
7. St. John’s
8. Xavier
9. Butler
10. DePaul
11. Georgetown
Sort of like Purdue in the Big Ten, we’ll look back on Villanova’s schedule this season and – injuries to Collin Gillespie and others aside – we’ll think, “This was one of the best eight teams, give or take, in the country. If they had played like it consistently, that would have been clearer.” The Wildcats’ win at Providence was a job well done, and they’ve beaten everyone once except Marquette. Speaking of whom, Marquette’s hot stretch is over, with three losses in four games and four of six, and Xavier is joining them on a bit of a slide.
Ivy League
1. Princeton
2. Yale
3. Penn
4. Harvard
5. Cornell
6. Brown
7. Dartmouth
8. Columbia
Both the Princeton women and the Princeton men have secured their trips to Harvard next month for “Ivy Madness.” The Tigers topped Brown and Yale to move back into first place in the league with three games to go. Cornell is sliding now with three straight losses, including to Dartmouth and Harvard, the latter of whom has moved into fourth in the standings by a half-game.
MAAC
1. Iona
2. Siena
3. Saint Peter’s
4. Monmouth
5. Quinnipiac
6. Marist
7. Fairfield
8. Manhattan
9. Niagara
10. Rider
11. Canisius
The top four remains unchanged after Iona gutted out a win at Saint Peter’s last Tuesday and Siena beat Saint Peter’s yesterday, while Monmouth held serve with a 1-0 week. It’s hard to say who deserves to be second-to-last right now, given Manhattan has won three straight and it wasn’t long ago that Niagara upset Iona and Monmouth, so Rider slips back to 10th despite its recent losses being very narrow.