City of Basketball Love

Stephen Pianovich (@SPianovich)
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Navy outscored Penn by six points in the final minute of a six-point win at the Palestra on Wednesday.

The Quakers outplayed the Midshipmen for most of the second half, and Steve Donahue realized his team did not lose the 65-59 contest because of the final 60 seconds. It was because of the first 20 minutes.

“We lost it in the first half,” the first-year Penn coach said after his team fell to 4-3 on the season. “Give Navy credit, we lost it in the first half with 11 turnovers and eight offensive rebounds given up.”

Navy (7-2) carried a 12-point lead into the locker room mainly due to two reasons: capitalizing on turnovers and rebounding.

The Midshipmen grabbed 17 rebounds to Penn’s 11 in the first half and eight of them came on the offensive glass. They turned those boards into eight second-chance points.

The Quakers also turned the ball over 11 times before halftime, and Navy, which switched its looks on defense multiple times, notched five steals. The visiting side turned those takeaways into 18 points.

So, Navy had 26 points in the first half because of the offensive glass or turnovers. Penn had zero.

“They do a great job basically switching almost everything (defensively),” Donahue said of Navy. “They played physical, and I thought they played without fouling. It absolutely kind of stung us a bit. I’ve tried to simulate it in practice the last couple of days. It was uncharacteristic – a couple of charges, four or five walks, things we haven’t done.”

Penn ended the game with 18 turnovers and four players were charged with at least three giveaways. The 18 are the most the Quakers have allowed this season, and they only had more than 11 on two occasions entering Wednesday’s tilt.

“We kind of just kept our energy high, we weren’t trying to worry about what they were going to do,” Navy guard Shawn Anderson said of his team’s defense. “We just focused on playing hard and getting our hands in passing lanes. It just so happened tonight that we got our hands on a lot of balls in the first half.”

The second half, though, was a completely different story.

Navy only secured 10 rebounds in the final 20 minutes, and just two came on the offensive glass. Meanwhile Penn hauled in 17 to end up outrebounding Navy for the game.

“They do a great job with offensive rebounding, and they do a great job percentage-wise with defensive rebounding,” Donahue said. “We talked about it before the game, and I thought we really competed on the defensive glass (after halftime).”

Navy also only had four points off turnovers in the second half and Penn ended up shooting 12-for-21 (57.1 percent) in the second half to make things interesting. Antonio Woods was the catalyst of the second-half spark, as he shot 6-for-9 and scored 13 of his team-best 16 points after the intermission.

The Quakers went on a late 11-2 run, which featured a Woods to Matt Howard alley-oop on a fast break, to tie game at 59 apiece with 63 seconds remaining. Darien Nelson-Henry, who finished with eight points (six from the foul line), made four consecutive free throws as the finishing touches on the run.

Anderson scored what turned out to be the game-winning bucket for Navy with 43 seconds left, and Penn would miss its final three free throws and two field goals down the stretch.

Penn came up short late, but it was really the what the team did early in the game which hurt the most.

“We played inspired basketball and were matching them punch for punch” Donahue said. “I felt we really outplayed them in the second half, we just didn’t come out on the winning side of it.”