The Ivy League Tournament gets underway on Saturday with No. 1 Yale taking on No. 4 Cornell at Newman Arena in Ithaca, N.Y.
Yale won the regular season with an 11-3 record, and they’ll nominally be the “home team” on Saturday, but this game and tournament are being hosted by Cornell, which throws a bit of a wrench into things.
Still, the bookmakers have established the Bulldogs as 3.5-point favorites for Saturday morning’s tilt in Upstate New York.
Yale vs. Cornell odds, prediction
It’s plain to see why Yale is the odds-on favorite to win the Ivy League Tournament. Not only did the Bulldogs boast the best record in the conference, but they had the best overall mark at an impressive 23-5. Yale is also the only team that sits inside the top-100 in KenPom’s power rankings.
The Bulldogs enter the tournament as the 81st-best team this season, per KenPom, putting them well ahead of the field: Harvard (151), Cornell (158), and Penn (164).
While Yale is a two-way team that thrives on elite three-point shooting, Cornell is a mercurial unit. The Big Red led the Ivy League in scoring (88.9 points per game), but they finished last in defense, conceding just over 83 points per contest.
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The latter is a huge red flag against Yale, which finished second in scoring, but balanced that out with the third-best defense.
The key to the Bulldogs’ success is depth, and the team’s collective ability to score from beyond the arc. Yale finished third in all of college basketball in 3-point percentage (40 percent) and boasts five players who average double-digit points per contest.
That scoring barrage is bad news for Cornell, which ranks 348th in defending 3-pointers, and is the 336th-best defense in KenPom’s rankings.
Don’t let Cornell’s pseudo-home-court advantage scare you away from backing Yale in this tilt.
The Play: Yale -3.5 (FanDuel)
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Michael Leboff is a long-suffering Islanders fan, but a long-profiting sports bettor with 10 years of experience in the gambling industry. He loves using game theory to help punters win bracket pools, find long shots, and learn how to beat the market in mainstream and niche sports.
