By DAN GARTLAND
STAFF WRITER
With 8:47 left to play in the first half of Fordham’s game against Harvard Saturday evening, senior guard Branden Frazier hit a jumper to put the Rams up 25-23. It was Fordham’s last lead of the game.
Over the next five minutes, Harvard went on a 15-0 run, and eventually took a 43-32 lead into the half. Frazier had 16 of Fordham’s 32. No one else had more than four.
“I thought we sleep-walked a bit in the first half, and in the first few minutes of the second half,” Fordham head coach Tom Pecora said.
Harvard had stretched its lead to as many as 17 before Fordham began chipping away at it.
While Frazier’s first half heroics kept Fordham within striking distance in the first half, he finally got some help in the second half. Freshman Jon Severe was ice cold in the early going. At halftime, he had only two points, on 1-5 shooting, and turned the ball over three times.
“I think he was struggling defensively a bit, and it carried over to his offensive game,” Pecora said. “I think he wasn’t as aggressive as he usually is. He has to come out of the gate that aggressive. Obviously if he has a first half like his second half, it’s a different night for us.”
In the second half he erupted for 27 points.
“He’s as good a scorer as we’ve played all season,” Harvard head coach Tommy Amaker said of Severe. “He’s so explosive.”
Around the 15-minute mark of the second half, Severe suddenly found his stroke. He made his first four three-point attempts of the half, including one more than 30 feet from the basket, to cut Harvard’s advantage to six: 62-56 with 10:30 remaining. But Harvard began slowly rebuilding its lead. Three-and-a-half minutes later, it was a 14-point lead for Harvard.
But again, Fordham made a move, and cut the deficit to six points with two minutes to play. Harvard, though, did a good job keeping the Rams at an arm’s length, and hit its free throws down the stretch to ice the game.
“We came down, made a couple shots, and then we just couldn’t stop them on the defensive end, which was making it tough for us to [continue] our run,” Frazier, who finished with 31 points, said. “Every time we made a basket, they had a response for it.”
As he did after Fordham’s loss to Sacred Heart, Pecora chalked the loss up to a lack of effort.
“We played [as hard as we’re capable of] for about 15 to 18 minutes,” he said. “That’s obviously very disappointing for me as a head coach and for our staff … Branden is our senior and he has to find a way to get these guys locked in, and have them understand the intensity you need to play with to beat a good team.”
For Pecora, the frustrating thing wasn’t that the Rams lost, but how they lost.
“If you play guts-out for 40 minutes and lose a game, you can sleep at night, but when you don’t, that’s what eats at coaches — because there’s great potential.”
