Siyani Chambers Injury Could Make Harvard a Contender in 2016-2017
Normally, when your star point guard tears his ACL in the summer before his senior season, it’s hard to find silver linings. However, in the case of Harvard Crimson head coach Tommy Amaker, I’m sure it didn’t take him long to realize the situation he may stumbled into.
Amaker’s top returner for this season was slated to be Siyani Chambers, one of the many highly regarded recruits that Amaker has controversially brought to Cambridge since he arrived in 2007. Only two years removed from Jeremy Lin running the point for Amaker, Chambers arrived with intentions of continuing the Crimson’s successes in the Ivy League.
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For the most part, he has reached that goal. Chambers isn’t the athletic scorer that Lin proved to be at the collegiate level, but he’s equaled his predecessor in terms of managing the tempo of Amaker’s complex transition heavy offense.
Most importantly, Chambers has led his team to three straight Ivy League titles. Lin never played in the Big Dance.
Now a senior, Chambers was expected to be leaned on heavily this year. Unfortunately, he recently suffered a torn ACL during a preseason workout.
Due to the Ivy League’s strange rule about not allowing graduate students to play varsity athletics, Chambers will have to drop out of school in order to remain eligible to finish his career during the 2016-2017.
That’s where we start to see the remnants of a silver lining.
With Chambers, it would have been impossible to count out Harvard as a contender in the Ivy, but realists would have admitted that the team wasn’t marked as a league favorite. It would have been unfortunate to see Chambers’ career with the Crimson not end on an NCAA Tournament stage, but that was where we were likely headed.
Instead, Chambers is now slated to be the starting point guard for next years’ team, and he’ll return to campus just in time to see that the cavalry has arrived. The Crimson have been recruiting have been recruiting with the big boys for awhile now, but the Class of 2016 may be the program’s biggest return.
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The Crimson already have commitments from a pair of ESPN100 power forwards, Chris Lewis and Robert Baker Jr.
Small forward Seth Towns is ranked right outside of the top 100 according to most recruiting services, but he still has more than enough talent to be an impact player in the Ivy next year.
The other positive that arises from Chambers’ misfortune is the reality that there are now 35 minutes per game that will now be allocated to other players, which means that there is an opportunity for another impact player to emerge in Chambers’ absence.
Regardless of the team finding another breakout star this season, adding the return of Chambers to the group of three impact prospects destined for campus next fall means a few things. Not only will the Crimson be next year’s favorites in the Ivy, but they may want to start trying on glass slippers a year in advance.
The Harvard Crimson have the early look of being
the first bracket busters of 2017.