March 16th, 2018: Harvard at Fordham (WNIT)

Just the Facts, Ma'am: Bre Cavanaugh scored 19 of her 26 points in the second half to power Fordham to a 65-47 comeback win over Harvard in the first round of the WNIT. G'mrice Davis added 12 points and 12 rebounds. Taylor Rooks had 18 to lead the Crimson, but she was the only Harvard player to break double figures.

For traveling in the Bronx at rush hour, traveling in the Bronx after rush hour, hotshot freshmen, loud fans, free food, and the important questions in life, join your intrepid and hoops-satiated blogger after the jump.

All right, now the Big Dance is upon us. But no one's playing nearby, so I don't care. Instead, it's off to Fordham for their first-round WNIT match-up with Harvard. If yesterday's example is anything to judge by, we should be in for some fun from the Harvard band.

Fortunately, the police action at Tremont Road didn't hold us up for too long. Still made it around quarter past six.

Bre Cavanaugh's hair is still normal. I'm sort of disappointed. She must be planning something spectacular for deep into the postseason. The longer she keeps color out of it, the more epic I expect it to be when she does go for it.

Harvard seems to have traveled some fans, but I don't even see Fordham's band, much less Harvard's. I guess the husband and I will have to provide all the noise. We're used to that sort of thing.

At halftime it's 33-24 Harvard, and that's honestly an improvement. Harvard's passing has been phenomenal, faster and more accurate than our defense has been able to hang with. We're not fast and we're not deep, and without Zara Jillings in the first half we have as much depth as a tabloid headline. Taylor Rooks put up 10 in the first quarter and 12 overall to lead Harvard. Fordham seems unwilling to shoot the ball- we already have two shot clock violations and another couple of possessions that have been dangerously close. Bre Cavanaugh's seven points is the team high.

Well, Bre Cavanaugh looked at that halftime deficit and basically went, "Nope. Nope, nope, nope." Cold-blooded assassin that she is, she took over the game in the third quarter and turned the tide in Fordham's favor. More people need to be talking about her nationally. She does not get the love or respect that she deserves.

Nota bene: no matter how much time pressure you're under, no matter how good of an idea it seems at the time, attempting to type on a laptop while racing along the Bruckner on the Q44 bus will result mostly in friction burns, motion sickness, and putting the A's in Cavanaugh in all the wrong places. It is not a good plan.

So, Harvard. When they took jump shots, their offense did not look terrible. Their passing was crisp and quick, outpacing the defense. But anything that wasn't a jump shot seemed to be a risky floater in the lane or a wild heave that hit anything and everything except the bottom of the net. Glass, rim, side of the backboard- that ball was going all over the place. Late in the game, they broke out a chaotic backcourt defense that might have rewarded them with turnovers at a different point of the game, instead of the cheap foul calls they got under the assumption that they were trying to foul.

Jadyn Bush got the unenviable job of defending the interior against G'mrice Davis (and to a lesser extent, Johanna Klug and Mary Goulding, plus whoever was inclined to drive). She ended up fouling out, and I'm not terribly surprised. I wasn't impressed with her positioning on the floor. I wouldn't have believed Nani Redford played 10 minutes if I didn't see it in the box score, so you can tell how impressed with her I was. Sydney Skinner played most of the game- it looked almost like senior privilege was invoked on this starting lineup, but that would be a fatalistic approach to take in a single-elimination tournament. Skinner's sort of a tweener- big body and isn't afraid to knock people over, but also likes to shoot from the outside. If I remember her year correctly, she's not a senior, so she's going to be big for them next season.

Someone else at the game compared Katie Benzan to Leilani Mitchell, and I can sort of see where they were going with this. She's very tiny (I'm not used to people being shorter than Lauren Holden) and very fast. Her jumper's pretty nice and she pulls up in the lane. But I don't see the same kind of passing eye from her on the break that I did from Mitchell. Benzan seems more ball dominant than Mitchell. I wouldn't be surprised if she considered Becky Hammon a role model. Taylor Rooks did a great job of getting open and staying open- we switched an awful lot to try and keep up with their passing. She's another odd-sized tweener, but she's got a nice jumper.

Kirby Porter didn't play much, and since she was inserted back into the game at the end when Fordham made the line change, I'm going to assume she started out of courtesy. Senior privilege is a thing. I think she was part of the frenetic end-game defense Harvard threw up as in desperation. I will save you all the bad graphic design/printing industry puns about rastering versus vector artwork, and merely say that Madeline Raster shoots well and had a solid all-around game. Jeannie Boehm was big on the inside, but had trouble handling passes.

I'm starting to think Harvard is used to getting the foul calls when they throw up those wild shots at the rim. There's no other reason for players as smart as Harvard students should be to do such stupid things on the floor.

Fordham got the chance to clear the bench in the final twenty seconds, to the point where one of the subs got delayed because you can't sub for the free throw shooter. The deep bench didn't get much of a chance to shine in those twenty seconds or so, so no, you're not getting individualized analyses, guys. Sorry. I don't know what Zara Jillings did to get benched in the first half, during a stretch when we could have used her defense, but I trust Coach Gaitley's judgment. She had a gorgeous pass to G'mrice on the inside, just when we thought she needed to shoot the damn ball. Kendell Heremaia made a nifty defensive play to recover a loose ball, then really started feeling her oats and launched a three. (Poor Kenny. Had to clean up all the balls from shootaround, and G kept firing them at her.)

Why, yes, I am worried about the fact that our starters played such heavy minutes that I can sum up the contributions of our bench in one not-huge paragraph.

I love the hustle Mary Goulding brings to the floor. She had one putback that I can only describe as utterly ridiculous, but if I did attempt to describe it, might sound something like "so the ball bounced off the rim, and Mary and another player were going up for it, and I think there were three hands on the ball and two of them were Mary's, and it sort of ended up being set into the basket". She brought a lot of grit on the glass, so I can forgive some of the moments I can only describe as derpy. I've never heard G'mrice Davis be so loud demanding the ball before- she was letting out the kind of whoops I usually make when the other team is at the free throw line. She went hard to the rack and met with heavy opposition, so she was putting up a lot of contested shots. She was bound and determined to get those rebounds, though. Johanna Klug looked slow all night. I think she ran into the freshman wall and never did figure out how to climb over it- when the offseason hits, she needs to get her act together.

I'm not used to Lauren Holden being taller than anyone on the floor, but she was bigger and taller than Benzan. She does tend to argue fouls, even when it's obvious she's pushing. There were a couple of moments when I thought she was starting to indulge her propensity to start chucking deep threes for the fun of it, but she restrained herself and ran more clock. I still have no idea how she managed to set an illegal screen, though. Not used to itty bitty guards setting screens. And then there was Bre Cavanaugh, who showed once again that the blood in her veins is as cold as ice. She took the game over in the third quarter, driving the lane and draining threes, and she was the one who put the game away at the end of the fourth. She saw that everyone was terrified to shoot and decided that she was going to take over. I just love what she already brings to the floor- and she's only a freshman, folks. Redshirt, but a freshman nevertheless.

I know Fordham likes to run a very deliberate offense, but there comes a point when you do have to shoot, and we lost sight of that in the second quarter. G'mrice getting caught with the ball to draw a shot clock violation right after she had a putback disallowed on not beating the buzzer was... yes, well, that summed up much of our offense at that point. And just when we got some momentum near the end of the second quarter, Harvard clamped down on defense and we started losing the ball. I really thought we were goners. But then Bre.

I think Fordham definitely got the benefit of the doubt from the officials, who were not good at procedural calls and let an awful lot of contact go.

Shoutout to the family in front of us, who led cheers with glorious enthusiasm (and later totally tried to pin the yelling on their kids). We needed them, and they answered the bell.

There was free pizza and apple pie, but the apple pie was from McDonalds, so I'm glad I passed. (Also, the new wraps at Subway are delicious.)

If Robert Morris had beaten Drexel, I'd have had an impetus to get these notes done sooner, because Fordham would have hosted the Colonials. But Drexel gets the homecourt advantage against the Rams, and I just don't have it in me to head to Philadelphia this weekend.

If this was the last time I ever got to see G'mrice Davis, then it was worth it. I hope it isn't, of course; I hope we beat the scales off Drexel and get homecourt advantage in the next round. But I love what we showed in this game, and I think it'll be important to carry forward both through the WNIT and into next year.