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Jeremy Lin's sudden rise with the New York Knicks brought new attention to the Harvard hoops program.

The hottest brand in basketball right now? Try Harvard.

Yes, the school known for ivy-covered halls and sky-high SATs is the home of one of the nation’s Top 25 college teams and is the alma mater ofNew York Knicks guard Jeremy Lin.


Forget Kobe, LeBron, Dwight and any other NBA star known by one name: Lin is hotter than all of them right now. He had a monster outing Friday night to help lead the Knicks past the Los Angeles Lakers 92-85 in a game nationally televised by ESPN. He scored 38 points and added seven assists, four rebounds and two steals.


It was his fourth consecutive 20-point game and the Knicks have won all four; he had scored 32 points all season before this recent outburst.

Lin spent last season with Golden State after not getting picked in the 2010 draft. He is the first American-born NBA player of Chinese or Taiwanese descent, and Friday night’s game was televised in China because of Lin’s emergence.

Meanwhile, Harvard, which is ranked 21st in this week’s coaches’ poll, improved to 21-2 with a 56-50 victory Friday night at Penn in what was the Crimson’s toughest remaining road game. It’s the best start by an Ivy League team since Princeton was 21-1 in 1997-98.

There’s definitely a basketball buzz on Harvard’s campus.

” ‘Jeremy Lin’ is on everyone’s lips. And everyone is talking about the ‘next’ basketball game,” said Nathan Georgette, a junior from Ponte Vedra Beach, Fla., who is an applied math major. “The football rivalry with Yale– that’s usually the biggest sports thing on campus. This has surpassed that by a mile.”


Harvard has had six home sellouts this season, and the four remaining home games already are sold out. The Crimson will sell out 10 of 12 home games this season, a program record.


Georgette said the interest in this season’s team started building last season, when the Crimson tied Princeton for the regular-season title but lost in a one-game playoff for the Ivy League’s automatic NCAA bid. Typically, once a season is over, students forget about the sport, Georgette said, but that wasn’t the case with the basketball team.

All five starters returned, and Harvard was expected to win the league this season. The Crimson is living up to billing. They are 7-0 in league play and own a two-game lead over Penn and Yale – a team they beat by 35 in New Haven, Conn. The Crimson plays again Saturday night against Princeton (7 p.m., ESPNU), which is in fifth place in the league.

That Harvard plays two games in two days is an example of the unbelievability of this story. Because the Ivy League doesn’t want players missing that much class – man, what a quaint notion! – all Ivy League road trips are back-to-backs, with a game Friday night and the another Saturday.

These are heady times for Harvard, which doesn’t exactly have a proud hoops history. The school has made one NCAA appearance – as part of an eight-team field in 1946, when the Crimson was a basketball independent. Harvard lost both its games in that tourney (there was a third-place game in each four-team regional), to Ohio State and New York University.

The Crimson didn’t finish above .500 in Ivy League play from 1998 to 2009, and last season marked the first time Harvard had captured even a share of the Ivy’s season title.

Tommy Amaker's arrival turned the Crimson's fortunes around and they appear headed back to the NCAA tournament. Amaker, 46, was hired at Harvard less than a month after being fired at Michigan. Amaker was 108-84 in six seasons with the Wolverines, but never took them to the NCAA tourney. Before being hired at Michigan, Amaker spent four seasons as coach at Seton Hall, where he went 68-55 with one NCAA appearance.The basketball rebirth began with the hiring of Tommy Amaker as coach in April 2007.


Harvard won a combined 22 games in Amaker’s first two seasons, then went 21-7 in 2009-10, which was Lin’s senior season. That team received a CIT bid, Harvard’s first postseason appearance since 1946, but engineering major Dario Sava said not that many students were paying attention.

“I didn’t even know of [Lin] as a freshman,” said Sava, a junior from Malden, Mass.

Now, Sava said Lin is a point of pride for Harvard students.

“He was smart enough to get into Harvard, which means he took a bunch of great classes,” Sava said. “And he obviously spent a lot of time working on his game.”

The Crimson finished 23-7 last season, which ended with an NIT bid.

The Crimson’s success and Amaker’s recruiting raised questions in 2008, with a New York Times story alleging improper contact with a recruit. But the Ivy League cleared Amaker that fall, saying no violations had occurred and that the school’s “admission of recruited men’s basketball players complied with all relevant Ivy League obligations.”