Game! Of! The! Night! 11/27/2007: Binghamton at Cornell

 

Binghamton (America East) at Cornell (Ivy League)
Newman Arena - Ithaca, NY
7:00 PM EST

It's a November Tuesday night, which means lots of guarantee games and prefab power-conference challenge matchups. But up in the occasionally snowy wilds of upstate New York, we have an intriguing battle of potential factors in their respective northeastern leagues, both of which are off to uneven starts.

The Big Red, an easy Ivy out since most of us were born, has started 3-1 and on Sunday knocked off Siena -- the team with the best talent in the Metro Atlantic. Cornell is prominently featured on many of Hoops Nation's leaderboards: they're shooting an even 50 percent from 3, 51.1 percent overall from the floor, and are fifth in the geektastic stats of points per weighted shot (1.27) and true shooting percentage (64.1). They have a total of six double-figure scorers -- six! -- and are averaging 88 per game. Not bad for a team that was slow and painful to watch just a season ago, a squad that often played in the 50's and 60's.

This here's a rematch of a pretty decent little game at The Mid-Majority Events Center a year ago, a 57-56 defensive slog won by the Bearcats. It's a different coach this time, though, as Binghamton only won 12 other games and brought in Georgetown product Kevin Broadus over the summer. He's got plenty of holdover talent -- perhaps enough to win the A-East -- but the team's been up and mostly down, coming in on a three-game slide after an impressive season-opening 88-75 win over NEC threat Quinnipiac. Keep an eye on Lazar Trifunovic, a 6-8 sophomore and a product of the Belgrade-to-Binghamton pipeline who was one of the few promising parts of the 2006-07 campaign. He's averaging 15.8 points per game so far.

CORN 73, BING 68