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The Harvard Crimson basketball team will host the UMass Mintemen at Lavietes Pavilion on Saturday.
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How to Watch UMass vs Harvard
The game (1 p.m. ET start time) won’t be on TV anywhere, but you can watch it live on ESPN+
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Once signed up for ESPN+, you can then watch UMass vs Harvard 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.
UMass vs Harvard Preview
The Crimson are 5-4, coming off a fourth-place finish at the Orlando Invitational. They bested the Texas A&M Aggies to open their tournament, then fell to the No. 5 Maryland Terrapins 80-73 to fall out of title contention.
Harvard then lost to the USC Trojans 77-62 in the third-place game for their first back-to-back defeats of the season. They had little answer for Trojans big man Onyeka Okongwu, who scored 27 points (on 12-of-14 shooting) and grabbed 14 rebounds, both game highs.
“[They were] too much for us to defend,” Harvard head coach Tommy Amaker said of USC’s frontcourt, according to the Daily Trojan.
Bryce Aiken, whose 21 points and 1.6 steals per game lead Harvard, managed just 10 points against the Trojans, shooting 3-of-13 from the field and committing 4 turnovers. Two days earlier, he dropped a game-high 30 points on the Terrapins, going 10-of-18 from the floor.
“Bryce can score with the best of them, no doubt about it,” Amaker said after the Maryland loss, according to The Harvard Crimson. “He had a pretty efficient offensive game here but he can be better than that, especially in certain areas in quarterbacking our team and leading our team. Those are areas we need him to embrace a little bit more, but certainly his scoring production is always something that we rely on.”
The Minutemen opened their season with five consecutive victories, but they’ve lost four straight since, most recently succumbing to the South Carolina Gamecocks 84-80 at home.
UMass center Tre Mitchell led the team with 17 points, adding 4 rebounds, 4 assists, and a block.
“I was proud of our guys from the standpoint of, you’ve got a top-10, top-five defensive team in the country and we scored 80 points,” UMass head coach Matt McCall said, according to The Massachusetts Daily Collegian. “The problem is, we turned it over 19 times and gave up 84. It’s hard to win when you give up that many points.”
The Minutemen hit five times as many 3-pointers, going 10-of-23 (42.3%) from distance; the Gamecocks shot 2-of-10 from deep, but overcame their rough long-range shooting by getting an abundance of looks around the basket
“We kept telling our guys, when they throw it to [Alanzo] Frink, when they throw it to Maik [Kotsar], do not run and trap them,” McCall said, per The Massachusetts Daily Collegian. “Allow those guys to try and initiate offense. Because they’re bigs, they’re not handlers, and we kept running at those guys and it was layups on the back side. If it wasn’t a layup, it was an offensive rebound tip-in.”
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