Gabby Anderson’s ACL tear is the latest obstacle for a Harvard team searching for consistency

What Moore didn’t count on was having to replace four starters from 2024-25 by December.

Senior guard Gabby Anderson tore her left ACL on Nov. 30 at Arkansas and will miss the rest of the season, Moore told reporters on Thursday. And sophomore point guard Lydia Chatira is out indefinitely with an unenviable combination of mononucleosis, strep throat and a hand injury.

There have been many more injuries up and down the lineup. The fifth starter from 2024-25, now-senior guard Saniyah Glenn-Bello, exited the season opener early with a hamstring injury but returned for the next game. Chatira has also dealt with ankle, groin and wrist injuries this season and has played just 40 total minutes in four games.

Junior point guard Karlee White supplanted Chatira in the starting lineup to begin the season and became one of Harvard’s best players, but she hasn’t played since sustaining a severe bone bruise on Nov. 19 at Boston College. First-year forward Maya Nahar hasn’t played at all because of a quadriceps injury, and first-year guard Olivia Jones missed three games with an ankle injury.

All of the injuries have made it difficult for Harvard to find consistency, especially against a schedule that ranks in the top 60 nationally. The Crimson are 6-5, with wins over Arkansas, Boston College and St. John’s but losses to Michigan, Alabama and South Florida.

“We’re continuing to learn lessons,” Moore said on Dec. 3. “I think when you lose your starting point guard, [your] leading scorer at the time, you have to kind of reinvent the wheel a little bit. And then now you lose Gabby … [and] I think you gotta reinvent the wheel a little bit. So I don’t know if we’ve really hit our stride in any type of way.”

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Before their injuries, White and Anderson established themselves, along with junior forward Abigail Wright, as two of the team’s leaders on and off the court. White was averaging 14.2 points, 4.7 rebounds, 1.7 assists and 1.7 steals — all career bests. Moore relied on her heavily on both ends and was looking to get her even more shots.

Anderson was the team’s anchor defensively and on the glass, averaging 4.3 points, a career-high 6.4 rebounds and 1.6 assists in nine games. At 5’11, she could play multiple positions, from harassing opposing ball-handlers at the top of Harvard’s press to battling in the post as a power forward in small lineups.

“Where last year it was Harmoni [saying], ‘Guys, we’ve gotta sit down, we gotta get a stop, we gotta do this,’ [now] it’s definitely Gabby,” Moore said on Nov. 19. “I mean, she’s the anchor in what we do there, and she leads by example. And people want to follow her.”

This is Anderson’s second ACL tear, almost three full years after she injured her other knee as a first-year. It came in Anderson’s homecoming game at Arkansas, the program her mother, Celia, played for.

“She just planted and kind of cut [and] came down wrong,” Moore said on Dec. 3 about the moment early in the second quarter when Anderson got hurt.

“The timing was not what I imagined for my senior season, but in a way, I have been preparing myself for this goodbye,” Anderson wrote on Instagram this week, adding the hashtag “retired” at the end of her message. “Still, nothing truly prepares you for the moment you realize the sport that shaped your entire life is suddenly behind you. …

“Basketball will always be a part of me, and I will cherish the memories forever. And don’t worry. This is not the last you will see of me. I have some beautiful things in the works, and I cannot wait to pour myself into the other talents I have been waiting to explore. My story is far from over.”

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Meanwhile, White is easing back into practice, with the goal of playing in the first game after final exams on Dec. 21. Her return will help Harvard weather Anderson and Chatira’s absence in several ways. She is the Crimson’s best downhill driver, which can help them move the ball more effectively and put more pressure on defenses. She’ll also take some of the perimeter scoring load off of Glenn-Bello, who is Harvard’s third-leading scorer behind Wright and White. White is also one of Harvard’s best defenders, as she showed with her game-sealing steal in the win over St. John’s on Nov. 7.

But Harvard still needs its supporting cast to step up without Anderson and Chatira. That includes Jones, first-year guard Aubrey Shaw, sophomore guard Nina Emnace, sophomore guard Alayna Rocco and junior guard Mary Hollensteiner.

Moore is letting them play through some mistakes, knowing how important their development now is to the team’s success in conference play. And though she’s a defensive-minded coach, she recognizes she may have to sacrifice some defense for offense, with Anderson out and Shaw and Rocco being stronger on offense than defense.

Before the Arkansas game, Moore took all but Hollensteiner aside for a talk about confidence.

“I thought just the four of them [were] really playing very hesitantly,” Moore said. “And maybe that’s because they’re trying to fight for minutes, they’re trying to get things right, and so then they get in their head. …

“I just said … ‘You guys are so worried about shooting it [and] it not going in, or making the pass and it not getting to your teammate, or sinking your hips and not getting a stop. But what if you sink your hips and do everything that we’re asking you to do and it does go right?’”

The talk seemed to work: Not only did Harvard get the 69-51 win, but Rocco scored 15 points and Shaw had a career-high 11 points and nine rebounds. Emnace, who played 81 total minutes as a first-year but has started five games this season, had 6 points and no turnovers in her best game as a starter.

Jones is still finding her footing offensively since returning from her ankle injury, but she has crashed the glass hard in Anderson’s absence. She had back-to-back career highs with seven rebounds against Holy Cross on Dec. 3 and 11 against Stony Brook on Dec. 5.

“She will go and get you some [rebounds] offensively, and she will box out and get in there and rebound defensively,” Moore said on Thursday. “… She’s just a utility kid that wants to do anything to help our basketball team win, which is a coach’s dream. … And I think Olivia has the ability to do more offensively than Gabby did, especially early on in her career. So looking for her to do that for sure.”

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Overall, Harvard is looking to find a consistent level of performance and toughness before conference play begins on Jan. 3. It showed resilience to win the games when White and Anderson got injured. But in between, it lost to Alabama by 20 points despite leading by 7 early in the third quarter.

On Nov. 25, the day after the Alabama loss, a frustrated Moore said her team’s response to game pressure was “to essentially panic and unwind.” She added, “If the game was 30 minutes, we’d be a really good basketball team. But it’s 40, and we’ve got to figure that out.”

Even during the team’s current three-game winning streak, there have been big swings from quarter to quarter. Against Holy Cross, the Crimson didn’t play well at all in the first half, in Moore’s estimation. But they held the Crusaders scoreless in the third quarter.

“That, to me, is the standard,” Moore said on Thursday about the third-quarter defense. “… We were flying around in the press. We closed more traps … and we just kept turning them over.”

Against Stony Brook, Harvard started the game on a 19-0 run. “I was like, ‘Are we about to do it again?’” Moore said. Harvard ended up winning the first quarter 25-6 — but then only scored 7 points in the second quarter. At halftime, Moore told her players that they had to play like that first-quarter team much more often and challenged them to shift the energy when things are going wrong.

Hollensteiner stepped up, scoring 11 of her career-high 17 points in the second half to help Harvard maintain a comfortable lead.

Something that has contributed to the uneven results is Harvard’s reliance on 3-pointers. It’s getting a third of its points from threes, which ranks in the 80th percentile nationally, and it’s shooting just 41.5% inside the arc, which ranks in the 20th percentile. So when 3-pointers are falling, Harvard sometimes looks dominant, and when they’re not, the offense can falter.

Moore and her staff tried to address this at a recent practice by counting layups as 3 points and shots from behind the arc as 2 points, incentivizing players to get to the rim. They are also trying to play faster, which they hope will produce some easier shots.

Defensively, the Crimson have fallen back toward the middle of the pack after boasting one of the top defenses in the country last season. They are giving up 86.9 points per 100 possessions, which ranks 161st nationally and is nearly 10 points worse than last season’s 78.4. (That ranked third in the country.)

One culprit has been their 17.5 turnovers per game on offense, which is the highest average since Moore took over in 2022 and makes defending much harder. Another has been their defensive rebounding, which has slipped somewhat from last season even as they’ve remained an excellent offensive rebounding team.

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On Dec. 3, Moore said the Crimson were “fighting for our season” while playing a flurry of nonconference games. Now, during final exams, they’re “heading into a different chapter of our season,” with more than two weeks between games to rest and work on their weaknesses.

And even with all the ups and downs they’ve faced, the Crimson have still emerged with a national NET ranking of No. 62. That’s well within range to make noise again in March, as long as they can apply the lessons they’ve learned to a difficult Ivy League schedule.

“I think the bottom half of our league is better than what it was, and I don’t think we’re as good,” Moore said. “So where do we fall? Who knows? But that’s why we’ve got to take advantage of all this practice time and these next two [nonconference] games to really take steps forward.”