Big Green Teams
"Things seem to get a little dull around Hanover in mid-January so I thought we could use some excitement."
That was George Blaney's SECOND reaction to a 93-88 overtime win over Boston College.
His first reaction after Dartmouth's initial game at Alumni Gym in more than a month was, "A man shouldn't have to go through a game like that to make a living."
Bob Zuffelato, the first-year Boston College coach whose team had lost three earlier games by one or two points, would have agreed on both points.
For Blaney's basketball team, it was a vital victory. The last time they had played before a home crowd, the opponent was Harvard and Dartmouth had been a spectacular 86-68 winner.
Since then the Indians had won only two of seven games, all of them on the road and all of them against the most rugged array of teams planted successively in Dartmouth's path in a long while.
"We needed a win and we needed to get home," said Blaney as his team headed toward a ten-day layoff in late January. "We didn't play well; in fact, we played good basketball for only about eight minutes against Boston College."
It was the right eight minutes, though, and it may represent something of a turning point for this Dartmouth team that was given an outside chance at challenging Penn and Princeton for the 1972 Ivy League title.
Playing on the road for a long period of time inevitably takes away some of a team's sharpness. It happened to Dartmouth as the Indians traveled to New York (where they beat Seton Hall in Madison Square Garden, 93-82) and then to the West Coast for three games in the Far West Classic at Portland, and then a singleton at Stanford.
It didn't let up as the ten-day trek pas followed immediately by a trip to penn and Princeton, and the ride home from that weekend may have seemed as long to Blaney and his team as the 3000-mile junket to get home from the West.
To recap the results of this prolonged foray:
The Far West Classic is one of the nation's best holiday tournaments and was a somewhat abrupt initiation for the Indians to the Pacific Eight Conference style of basketball—in a word, physical.
It all began with a 106-72 loss to Oregon State (the host team—and host teams in the Far West Classic aren't routinely paired against power in the first round).
Then came Washington and Dart- mouth was worked over again, 100-75. By the time they got to the final game (which determined seventh place in the eight-team field), the Indians had revived somewhat from the shock of the first two games and began to put things together.
They defeated Oregon, 92-82, as Blaney notched a victory over Dick Marter, the man who led Penn to 28 straight Ivy League wins during the past two season and who now coaches the Ducks.
If you're from the West Coast and are familiar with Pacific Eight basketball, you know that the manpower in that league cuts its teeth in the redwood forests. If you're Eastern-bred, you can't really appreciate the overall size factor that confronted the invading Green.
"I'd sure like to have one of those small Eastern backcourt guys like your Bill Raynor," said Marv Harshman, the Washington coach, to Blaney.
The conversation between the coaches provided the only eye-to-eye matchup of manpower for Dartmouth during the whole tournament.
The aftermath of the Far West Classic was a New Year's weekend visit to Stanford, the Indians of the Pacific Eight. Stanford was rated a questionable quantity in the Pac-8 but turned the Hanover tribe on its ear with a 102-85 victory that was made conspicuous by Claude Terry, a Stanford guard who scored 32 points and missed only three of 17 shots from the floor.
It was also made conspicuous by five technicals called against various members of the Dartmouth team. The third of these calls came when James Brown, the fine guard, was assessed a technical for refusing to give up the towel that covered his sweating shoulders in order that the referee could use it to wipe someone's expectoration from the sideline.
"Get a towel from Stanford," suggested Blaney in defense of his player. That was worth the fourth technical.
"You've got to be kidding," said Blaney. "You're bush."
Technical number five
It was only a question of the final score when Jim Masker, the center, picked up his third foul in the sixth minute of the game after scoring 10 of Dartmouth's first 19 points.
But this is not the place to belabor that point. Nor, perhaps, is it the place to make it. Dartmouth's record as it headed East on a long, overnight flight would have been the same, in all probability, but it was a week that will be remembered by 12 players and their coach.
Penn and Princeton are the outstanding teams in the Ivy League this season and both proved their ability in trimming the tired Indians, 92-62 and 84-73, during the weekend following the western trip.
"We're playing well in spots but inconsistency has been a problem," said Blaney after the hiatus from home boards.
Paul Erland played well at Portland, as did Brown. Erland was an alltournament selection and the event's top scorer, while Brown was close behind and was instrumental in the win over Oregon with 28 points.
Coming out of the Boston College game, they had identical point totals-229 for a 20.8 average. Raynor had a 16.8-point average—he had scored 56 field goals in 11 games and had assisted on 55 others, twice as many as any other player.
"Billy hasn't been shooting well but he's playing well," said Blaney. "He makes us go." That's not an overstatement at all, considering the Indians are averaging 10 points more per game than any previous Dartmouth team.
The finest individual scoring performance of the season belonged to Erland against Boston College. He had 38 points and cooly canned an 18-foot jump shot as the buzzer sounded to create an 81-81 tie. The overtime win seemed inevitable after that.
Dartmouth had trailed by 13 points with seven minutes left in the game but Erland was remarkable in the hard-to-believe comeback that restored the confidence to a weary team that still has a long way to go.
Paul Erland sinks two of the 38 pointshe scored in the overtime victory overBoston College in Hanover.
