City of Basketball Love

Will Slover (@WillSlover31)
--

Fifty-one conference championships, 12 undefeated seasons in conference play, 47 NCAA Tournament appearances, and two Final Fours.

These are just some of the many accolades that the Penn and Princeton men’s basketball teams combine to boast as a part of their storied rivalry.

The Penn Quakers and Princeton Tigers have squared off every year since 1903, making it the third longest consecutive rivalry in all of college basketball, and the newest part of the Penn-Princeton saga will take place on Saturday at Princeton’s Jadwin Gymnasium.

“For the first 50 years of this league, I thought it was the best rivalry in college basketball because so much was at stake,” Penn head coach Steve Donahue said. “Other rivalries, both teams would still make the NCAA tournament but essentially, the team who won this battle won the Ivy League so there’s a lot of emotion for it.”

Fro 1963 to 2007, one of the two historically great programs won or shared in winning the Ivy League title every season except for two, in 1986 and 1988.

Although Penn currently holds the advantage on the all-time series 124-110, Princeton has had the Quakers’ number in the last four contests. With both teams ranking in the Top 150 in KenPom’s rankings, Saturday’s bout should be one that kicks off Ivy League play with a bang.

Penn comes into the contest on a three-game winning streak with wins at Central Florida, and over Drexel and Fairfield at the Palestra.

“I think for the most part, we’ve been very consistent on the defensive end and that’s what we did in all three of these games,” Donahue said. “In the Drexel and Fairfield games, we started to put the offense together as well.”

Penn (6-5), which had only scored more than 73 points once prior to the Drexel game, amassed that total in both of the team's wins over Drexel and Fairfield.

Their high scoring effort in those two contests can be highly attributed to the play of freshman A.J. Brodeur.

The 6-foot-8 forward poured in 19 against Drexel in a precursor to a career outing against Fairfield, where he torched the Stags for a career-high 27 points on 12-of-18 shooting, and also added in 10 rebounds and three blocks.

Although Brodeur, who is averaging 15.5 points, 6.5 rebounds and 2.2 blocks per contest, and senior guard Matt Howard, who averages 13.4 points and is tied with Brodeur for the team lead in rebounds per contest, get all of the credit for Penn’s success in the young season, it’s another contributor who doesn’t stand out in the box score that Donahue is impressed with.

Redshirt junior Matt MacDonald, a Fairleigh Dickinson transfer, finds himself seventh on the team in points per game, averaging just 4.5 per contest, but also spends more time on the court than every other Penn player besides Brodeur.

“Matt MacDonald’s input on games doesn’t necessarily show up in the box score, but he’s really made our defense solid,” Donahue said. “Our defensive numbers have made dramatic improvement. We’re one of the best defensive teams, if not the best defensive team, in our league and he has a lot to do with it. He guards multiple guys, he rebounds, we can play the zone because he’s really good at the back of the 1-3-1.”

The 6-foot-5 MacDonald will have to continue to make his presence felt on Saturday, as the combo guard will have his hands full with Princeton’s three-headed scoring monster of Steven Cook, Devin Cannady, and Spencer Weisz.

Cook, Cannady, and Weisz, who combine to average 39.1 points per game, have been causing problems for their opponents all year as all three can score in a multitude of ways.

“I think just their experience with the three major guys,” Donahue said. “Weisz and Cook in particular, and then the ability of Cannady, they’re a team that just doesn’t beat themselves.”

On top of having three players that can do it all on the offensive end, Princeton also excels in not turning the ball over, as they rank 14th in Division I hoops with just 10.7 per contest.

“They’re a team that just doesn’t beat themselves,” Donahue said. “They take care of the ball so well, they shoot the ball very well, and they don’t give up offensive rebounds so there’s very rare opportunities that you’re going to get something easy because typically, you get that off of turnovers and offensive rebounds but they don’t do that.”

The Tigers (7-5), who were picked to finish at the top of the Ivy League in the preseason, rank 18th in the country in turnover percentage, 22nd in the country in offensive rebound percentage allowed, and 40th in three point percentage. All of these factors, combined with the enhanced meaning of the regular season in Ivy League play, makes this league opener as important as any in the country.

Although some might say that since the Ivy League adopted a conference tournament, their regular season games lost meaning, the layout of their tournament dictates exactly the opposite.

“I think you have to realize that even though we have a conference tournament, we eliminate half of our league,” Donahue said of the four-team tournament. “It’s not like every other league where everybody goes so these games, comparative to the rest of college basketball, are still more important because you can’t afford to get behind too much.”

If your pair the rich history of the programs with how important each and every Ivy League regular season game is to making it to the postseason, Saturday’s league-opener will be as big as any game for either team this season.

After all of the dominant years shared by these two programs, both have fallen off a bit as of late, with neither Penn nor Princeton having won a regular season conference title since 2011. If both teams’ performance in the nonconference portion of their schedule is any indicator of what lies ahead, both programs will see themselves rise to the top in the near future, and this game will be an early stepping stone to see who can make the first move.

“The competitiveness to bring both of these programs back on top of the league makes the rivalry that much more special now,” Donahue said. “And I think both programs are headed in the right direction trying to do that.”