Princeton flushes Yale loss with commanding win over Brown

By Andrew Hefner (@Ahef_NJ)

PRINCETON, N.J. — It was a huge night for the young core of the Princeton Tigers in a big win over their Ivy League foe Brown, 69-49 at home. 

As the starting lineups were announced in front of a packed Jadwin Gymnasium crowd, a murmur spread amongst the Princeton faithful when freshman CJ Happy was announced as the fourth starter for the Tigers. Happy, a 6-foot-9 forward, replaced the consistent Philip Byriel in the lineup, who shot 0-for-6 from beyond the arc in Friday’s loss against Yale. Byriel would only play one minute in the entire contest against Brown. 

Happy made an immediate impact, assisting on a big 3-pointer for senior Blake Peters for Princeton’s second bucket of the game. The Tigers and Bears would go on to trade blows for the first part of the half, with Aaron Cooley and Lyndel Erold dropping long threes before star guard Kino Lilly, Jr. would get a few points of his own for the Bears. 

NBA Draft prospects Xaivian Lee and Caden Pierce also entered the mix with important threes of their own before Happy joined the scoring party with the triple, which was expertly set up by Lee. 

Peters, started to turn on the jets midway through the first half, taking two more fadeaway threes to give the Tigers a 14-point lead with 5:11 remaining in the half. Peters ended the frame with 11 points, leading the team, and would go on to play a season-high 35 minutes in the win. 

“You find a senior, I mean, I just ask him, ‘how are you?’ And he kind of just stares at me and doesn't blink and he says, ‘I'm fine.’” said head coach Mitch Henderson when asked about Peters’ role on the team. “This is a junior, senior-driven league and it's not a unique thing. That's what really steers things, the maturity of those guys. And he’s just like 22 going on 40, just solid. Everything about him.”

Brown would go scoreless for four minutes until, with four minutes remaining in the first half, Lilly scored three points to cut the Bears’ deficit to 11. Princeton freshman Jack Stanton also played a pivotal role in the win. He finished the game with a plus-17, the highest of any player on either side, along with six points off of two big threes. 

“Huge. I mean, Jack Stanton specifically, I say he's the Energizer bunny,” Pierce said. “He came in tonight, he's flying around and that's just a carryover from last night. We saw what he did last night when the game wasn't going our way, but I mean, everybody who came in was ready to play today and it showed. We had huge contributions from the bench and we need to keep that going forward.” 

“He breathes fire, the kid,” Henderson added. “He's just got moxie, just like pouring out of him and he's gotta play and he's just absolutely fearless.”

At halftime, the Tigers had a substantial lead of 37-23, but had yet to see big contributions from their stars. Meanwhile, Brown was being bullied on offense, but Lilly got to work out of the locker room, making two straight three-pointers to cut the lead to eight. Aaron Cooley would further the damage with two more layups to bring Princeton’s lead down to four as the Bears opened the half with a 10-0 run. 

Jackson Hicke, a sophomore for Princeton, quickly came to the Tigers’ aid as he drove to the bucket for an important layup and earned a foul on the way down for a three-point play to start rebuilding the hosts’ lead. 

“It was a really important bucket,” Henderson recalled. “They were on a big run and those were the kind of plays that deflate other teams. We've been struggling to get easy twos. So we got to the foul line tonight.”

Princeton would continue to do a good job halting Brown’s scoring, eventually allowing Lee to get hot towards the end of the game. 

“It seemed like he thought it was his best defensive game of the season, which we really needed,” Henderson said of Lee. “And I told him this before, he hasn't had many on this season, so it's important for him to have a good game like that. He was active, which we needed.”

Princeton will continue Ivy League play on Friday at Penn, and will be looking to climb its way back up the rankings after their two losses to Cornell and Yale.