Equations

TODAY'S lesson: There are two teams, each of which has played roughly a dozen games. One has won half of its games, the other has won just once. Question: Which team is playing with greater consistency?

Right — the 1-11 team is more consistent, but what lies hidden in the equation is that the 1-11 team, despite the record, is playing to the absolute limit of its ability. Therein lies the tale of the first half of the winter season for Dartmouth's basketball and hockey teams. In hockey, there have been moments of excellence, and a mid- January win over Vermont was the measure of what George Crowe's team can do. In basketball, Gary Walters has asked — and received — everything but a pint of blood from a group that, Walters feels, is executing better than did the Dartmouth basketball team a year ago that won 16 games.

"There are a lot of people who think that our freshman team has the talent that will provide the starting point for the rebuilding of Dartmouth basketball," says Walters. "They're wrong. The starting point is this team, right now, because they are fully aware of their limitations and understand that the only way they will achieve anything is through the investment of pure, unadulterated sweat. The record this season is going to be terrible. I know it, the players know it. What they also realize is that they are setting an example in raw dedication that will be the standard for the teams that will represent Dartmouth during the coming years."

Clearly, some lessons are learned with greater pain than others. The guy who has discovered what it is all about in basketball this season is Larry Cubas, the scoring leader for two years. On the strength of his talent Cubas has to accept the greatest burden of the offense with the understanding that to be effective he must still work within the framework of the disciplined system that Walters learned from his highly successful mentors at Princeton, Butch van Breda Kolff and Pete Carril.

"We simply don't have the offensive ability to score much more than 50 points a game," says Walters. "Larry has realized that he can score within the system — he's averaged close to 17 points per game — but what's more important is that he's recognized the value of passing up the forced shot. We need patience because we don't have the ability to match the scoring potential of any team we play. When I look at the box score of our game with Davidson [a .59-54 loss] and see that Larry has 19 points — and seven assists — I know we're accomplishing something even though we haven't won the game."

The objective in basketball this winter is largely a quest for survival with respectability. Dartmouth's hockey team is scrambling for a return trip to the ECAC playoffs, but the consistency factor that must be a part of that pursuit had not materialized by mid-January. It is difficult to see consistency among very many of the 17 colleges that compete in Division One because only three teams look like they are effectively out of the playoff picture; the ability of any team to beat another on any night makes the business of playing with consistency seem almost absurd. A team can play well tonight and lose, play a fair game tomorrow night and escape with a win.

In mid-January there was a series of four games that Crowe felt would go a long way toward measuring the direction this season would take. It started at St. Lawrence, followed by home games against Harvard and Vermont, then a visit to Boston College. "They were all hard games and I figured we'd be in pretty good shape if we came out of it with two wins," said Crowe.

St. Lawrence hadn't beaten a Division One team to that point and had been whacked by Harvard, 10-0, three nights earlier. Yet it took a goal in the last five seconds by defenseman Doug Bradley to give Dartmouth a 6-5 win, no mean feat if you recall that Dartmouth had not won a game in seven tries in downtown Canton dating from 1951. That was one, and it appeared the Green would have another, or at worst a tie, with Harvard. The Crimson won it, 3-2, with a shot that Jeff Sollows thought he had pinned to the goal post only to have it slither off his skate ride the goal line for three feet, and come to rest by barely the diameter of the puck inside the goal.

Two nights later, against Vermont, the Green put together its best game, ripping the Catamounts, 8-4, as the checking game worked magnificently and Brian McCloskey set the tempo by scoring after 45 seconds of play (freshman Don O'Brien took the cue and scored three times before it was over). That performance carried over for nearly 30 minutes of the game at Boston College before the weakness that Crowe was working to solve, the Green's inability to operate efficiently when playing short-handed, came home to roost. Quicker than you can say "power play," BC had used the edge to score twice, added another three seconds after another power situation went off the board, and made Dartmouth's 3-0 lead disappear in a flash. The Eagles won, 8-5, and while Dartmouth had earned a split of the four games, there was a feeling that things might have been a whole lot better. The saving grace was that games with Penn, Northeastern, and Yale — all figuring to be eventually out of the playoff picture — were the next stops before a five-game stint in early February shaped up with Cornell (twice), Boston College, Providence, and New Hampshire — all fully expecting to be in the playoff picture when March rolls around.