Last night’s Penn win at Hawai’i is one of the better road wins by an Ivy team in recent seasons. The Warriors (7-4) were shorthanded and tired from playing five games in ten days, but the Quakers had their own issues with a 15-day layoff and the flight to the Aloha State. In a game that Penn led almost all the way through but never by double digits, three plays late in the game loomed large.
The first came with just over eight minutes remaining when Ibby Jaaber took a handoff from David Whitehurst in front of the Penn bench, made a jab step, and drained a 24-foot three-pointer over Whitehurst and two Hawai’i players to give Penn a 50-41 lead.
Then, with Penn clinging to a 54-51 lead in the final minute, Eric Osmundson milked the shot clock under ten seconds out at the midcourt stripe, then blew by his man, split the defense with a drive down the lane, and hit a tough layup to put the Quakers up five.
But after Penn blew several opportunities to put away the game at the free throw line, it had to inbound the ball against the Warrior press up just two with 13.6 seconds left. When Whitehurst cut in front of Jaaber on the inbounds pass, the two collided and Hawai’i’s Matt Lojeski found himself with the ball and a pretty clear path to the basket. Steve Danley left his man to slide over, and when Lojeski tried to exploit this by feeding the open Ahmet Gueye under the basket for a layup, Danley appeared to react quickly enough to get a finger on the pass, then tracked down the loose ball in the corner.
Coming off the long layoff, Fran Dunphy’s motion offense looked surprisingly sharp early on, making some great cuts and passes to jump out in front. But it was the defensive intensity that really stood out. The Hawai’i television crew commented repeatedly on the Quakers’ aggressive play on defense. Penn was anticipating Hawai’i’s decisions very well and playing stifling team defense. When the offensive execution flagged late in the first half with some turnovers and blocked shots, the defensive intensity also suffered. But the Quakers were able to make several strong defensive stands in the game’s final minutes to preserve the win. NBA prospect Julian Sensley finished with just four points in 32 minutes for the Warriors — just the second time he has scored fewer than 14 points on the season.
Instead it was Jaaber who looked like the best player on the floor, hitting big shot after big shot. When Hawai’i backed off him, Jaaber drained shots from the arc. When the defense played him too tight, he drove into the lane and hit the lethal one-handed floater that has become his trademark shot. But Jaaber doesn’t deserve all the credit. In addition to his huge drive and layup, Osmundson also hit a big three-pointer in the second half and twice stepped in from the three-point line to smoothly drain long two-pointers.
The win snapped a league-wide 15-game losing streak that had dropped the Ivy League’s composite record to 31-50. If it weren’t for the streak of 11 straight wins by Ivy teams earlier this year en route to the 16-8 start, the Ivy League would be in bad shape right about now.
Yale underwhelms
The Bulldogs didn’t play like the favored team in the first half last night in Corpus Christi, falling behind a struggling James Madison squad 44-22 and trailing by 15 at intermission. Yale got it going offensively in the second half, but JMU’s Jomo Belfor scored 25 of his 28 points in the final 20 minutes, single-handedly holding off the Bulldogs’ attempt to rally. The Dukes’ 12-for-23 shooting from the three-point arc was the difference in this one. And now instead of a matchup against a good TAMU-CC squad in the tournament’s title game, Yale has to take on Division I-in-name-only Savannah State.
Dartmouth can’t keep up
After a nip-and-tuck first nine minutes, the Big Green trailed Radford by six to nine points almost the entire rest of the game. Dartmouth never was able to string together the defensive stops it needed. Terry Dunn seemed to be desperately searching for defensive answers, as 14 different players saw action in this one.
Tonight’s action
2-0 would be great. 1-1 would be a disappointment. 0-2 would be a sign of the apocalypse.
Yale (5-6) vs. Savannah State (1-13) – 7:00 pm – Corpus Christi, TX
Calling Savannah State “bad” is like calling Idi Amin “rude.” The Tigers have to rank as one of the worst teams in the history of Division I men’s basketball. After scheduling NAIA weakling Wilberforce for the season opener and squeaking out a four-point win, Savannah State has dropped its next 13 games by an average of 35 points. As a matter of fact, the only loss by fewer than 20 points was a home loss to NAIA school Webber. If Yale doesn’t win this game by at least 25, James Jones should make his team swim the Intracoastal Waterway to its next game in Houston against Rice.
Cornell (4-6) at Long Beach State (3-6) – 10:35 pm
Lenny Collins returns to his home region looking to turn around a senior season that has seen him get off to a terrible start. The preseason Ivy League Player of the Year candidate is shooting just 33.1 percent from the field, is on pace for a career-worst rebounding average, and is posting 3.2 turnovers per game to just 2.2 assists per contest. The 49ers are 5-point favorites at home, which sounds about right, given Cornell’s recent problems.
