Despite the dead atmosphere in the Ravens’ Nest, the Carleton men’s varsity basketball team battled hard for two gritty victories against the University of Toronto Varsity Blues and the Ryerson University Rams Jan. 29 and 30.

The men began the two-day haul by defeating the Varsity Blues 75-53 in what seemed like an easy game, but turned out to be a nail-biter in the third quarter.

The first quarter saw the hoopsters get off to a bit of a shaky start, letting Toronto score nine fairly easy points.

However, the Ravens shut them down after that, ending the first quarter with a sizable 13-point lead, including a buzzer-beater by co-captain Mike Kenny to make it 22-9.

The Ravens continued to dominate in the second, and finished the half with a comfortable 32-17 lead.

Third-year Cole Hobin made back-to-back blocks, and tight defence from the Ravens in general forced numerous turnovers by Toronto.

“We did some good things defensively,” said head coach Dave Smart, “but we had a bad spurt in the third quarter.”

Toronto came back from the break fired up and outscored the Ravens 24-19, bringing them within 10 points of the Ravens at the end of the third.

“We’re still very sloppy offensively, and against good teams like Toronto they’re going to make a run, and they did,” Smart said.

Unfortunately for the Ravens, the offensive drought and relaxed defence let the Rams score 36 points in the second half compared to the 17 the Rams scored in the first half.

“The first half was better,” Kenny said. “The second half wasn’t great. We pretty much took the third quarter off defensively.”

However, the surge was too late for the Varsity Blues, and despite the full-court press, the Ravens hooped another 24 points in the fourth quarter and only let the Rams score 12 in return, making it 75-53 in the end.

“We need to work on our consistency, but for the most part we were pretty solid,” Kenny said.

However, the next night’s game didn’t prove to be very consistent for the Ravens either when they narrowly defeated the Ryerson Rams 78-70 in a game that was a back-and-forth battle between the two teams.

Carleton took the upper hand in the first quarter, outscoring Ryerson 26-16, but the Rams fired back in the second to outscore the Ravens 19-16, making it 42-35 going into halftime. 

“Brutal,” Hobin said. “From the beginning we played like we just wanted this to be over.”

Unfortunately for Carleton, the game was far from over in the second half and at one point, the Rams came within three points of the Ravens.

“We let one of their guards, who we weren’t going to give anything easy to, score pretty much all their points,” Hobin said.

The guard in question, Boris Bakovic, scored the game-high 31 points for the Rams, bringing the game a lot closer than the Ravens wanted.

However, despite Bakovic’s best effort, the Ravens triumphed with an eight-point victory over the Rams.