Brown’s Mark McAndrew finished with 25 points.

Journal / Glenn Osmundson

PROVIDENCE — Friday-night basketball in the Ivy League doesn’t get much better than last night at the Pizzitola Center, if you were Brown.

Combining their best defense of the season with a stellar effort on offense, the Bears led from start to finish, by as many as 31 points in the second half, and crushed Dartmouth, 77-51.

Coach Craig Robinson started clearing his bench with 4:30 to play and was able to rest his starters for tonight’s game against Harvard.

“What makes this one sweeter is we challenged these guys. This is the first weekend we were expected to win on Friday and are expected to win on Saturday. To have it go like this on Friday will help us on Saturday,” he said after his team improved to 11-8 overall, 3-2 in the league. Dartmouth dropped to 8-11, 1-4.

Brown’s defense was aggressive from the start, pestering Dartmouth’s guards, clogging the passing lanes and lunging for loose balls. The Bears forced 19 turnovers, 15 on steals, and converted them to 25 points. Third-stringer Garrett Leffelman had three steals. Twenty of their 24 rebounds were off the defensive glass.

Dartmouth shot 40.4 percent from the field, but only 15.4 percent (2-13) from 3-point range, and 50 percent from the free-throw line (7-14). Only one Dartmouth player scored in double figures. Forward Alex Barnett, the Ivy League’s leading scorer (16.9) and rebounder (7.1), finished with 10 points on 5-for-16 shooting and 5 rebounds.

“This was our last year’s defense,” Robinson said. “We played defense like this all the time. We’re winning more on offense this year.”

Brown’s offense was balanced except for Mark McAndrew, who made shots last night the way Tiger Woods makes putts. The senior from Barrington was near-perfect: 8-for-10 from the field, 3-for-3 from 3-point range, and 6-for-6 from the line. He missed his first shot, made his next five, missed a layup and made his next three. He finished with 25 points, 16 in the first half. Matt Mullery and Scott Friske each had nine points.

“He’s been dying to have a game like this, and it started with defense. He was real active on defense,” Robinson said.

“I think we had a really good week of practice. Some of the young guys did a real good job running the Dartmouth stuff. And we were able to stop them with our defense,” McAndrew said. “We’ve been emphasizing defense in practice the last couple of weeks. We got our intensity up. We got after them on defense.”

The defensive highlights included two blocked shots by Mullery. The offensive highlight? Let’s start with Adrian Williams’ layup on an alley-oop pass from Damon Huffman that put Brown ahead by 27-15, and end with the play of the game, which occurred with 33 seconds remaining and the Brown victory secure. Freshman Chris Taylor grabbed a defensive rebound and heaved a long pass to sophomore guard Steve Gruber, who caught the ball near the baseline just to the left of the basket. Gruber knew he had no shot, and with his back to the court flicked a reverse overhead drop pass to the trailing Leffelman, who made the layup.

Steve Nash couldn’t have done it better, and the crowd of 1,208 loved it.

“If he’s our fifth guard,” Robinson said of Gruber, “then we’re doing all right.”Brown

77

Princeton

51

Next Game

Tonight

vs. Harvard,

7 p.m.

mszostak@projo.com