Getty Buffalo guard Jayvon Graves.
The Buffalo Bulls basketball team will host the Dartmouth Big Green at Alumni Arena on Friday in each team’s season opener.
The game (7 p.m. ET start time) won’t be on regular cable TV anywhere, but you can watch it live on ESPN+, the streaming service from ESPN that has exclusive coverage of most Ivy League and MAC basketball games this season, plus tons of other college basketball and live sports every week, all the 30-for-30 documentaries and additional original content (both video and written) all for $4.99 per month.
You can sign up for ESPN+ right here, and you can then watch Buffalo vs Dartmouth live on your computer via ESPN.com, or on your phone (Android and iPhone compatible), tablet, Roku, Amazon Fire TV, Apple TV, Chromecast, PlayStation 4, Xbox One, or other streaming device via the ESPN app.
Dartmouth vs Buffalo Preview
The Bulls went 32-4 overall and 16-2 in MAC play last season, winning the conference’s regular season and tournament titles and setting program records for wins, conference wins, winning percentage, and conference winning percentage. They reached the second round of the NCAA Tournament, then fell to the Texas Tech Raiders, the eventual runners-up.
Three days after the defeat, head coach Nate Oats resigned to take the same position with the Alabama Crimson Tide, ending a four-year run at the helm of the Bulls. To replace him, the school promoted Jim Whitesell, the team’s associate head coach since 2015.
“Coach Whitesell has been with me my whole career here, so it’s not too much of a change and I feel great going into this season,” senior guard Davonta Jordan said during the preseason, according to The Spectrum.
Over the offseason, the Bulls saw five seniors graduate, including their three top scorers (CJ Massinburg, Nick Perkins, Jeremy Harris), their fifth-leading scorer (Dontay Caruthers), and their seventh-leading scorer (Montell McRae).
“We’ll be a little different than last year. You can’t just clone those guys, they were special players,” Whitesell said, per The Spectrum. “I think [the players] just have to be themselves, we’ll look at what each guy’s strength is and improve their weaknesses.”
Dartmouth went 11-19 last season, finishing in the basement of the Ivy League with a 2-12 conference mark in their third year under head coach David McLaughlin.
Each of the Big Green’s seven top scorers from 2018-19 are back this season, and the team lost just one rotation player — guard Guilien Smith, who graduated.
They’ll add redshirt sophomore guard Trevon Ary-Turner, who sat out last season while practicing with the Big Green after transferring from the Weber State Wildcats.
The 6’3″ guard played sparingly for Weber State as a freshman in 2017-18, averaging 10.3 minutes and 3.7 points per game, but shot efficiently, connecting on 41.9% of his 3-point attempts and 58.8% of his shots from inside the arc.
“He’s a very seasoned, mature player who brings that approach to practice every day,” McLaughlin said in February, according to The Dartmouth. “I would say he’s taken full advantage of the opportunities to improve in terms of getting in the gym, watching film and getting himself better.”
The coach added: “He’s a terrific fit for us. He has a great feel for the game, good range and he can finish around the rim. There’s a lot of qualities he brings to the table that really help the way we want to play.”