City of Basketball Love

Zach Drapkin (@ZachDrapkin)
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Penn’s Ivy League tournament hopes aren’t on life support yet, but they’re certainly in the danger zone.

Following an 82-70 loss to Brown at home on Saturday night, the Quakers are 0-3 in conference play to start the year and play Harvard, Dartmouth, and Princeton in their next three Ivy League contests.

It’s not the way any coach wants to see his team play heading into crunch time.

“I thought the whole night, we were playing uphill,” Penn (6-8, 0-3) head coach Steve Donahue said. “Nothing was easy for us on defense, nothing was easy for us on offense.”

The Quakers struggled to gain momentum throughout the night, surrendering the lead midway through the first half on an 11-0 Brown run and failing to overcome it for the rest of the night.

Penn cut the lead down to two with under eight minutes to go in the game, but untimely mistakes ultimately doomed the side, which committed 16 turnovers on the night.

Matt Howard scored 20 in the losing effort, while Darnell Foreman added 19 and A.J. Brodeur had 12 points and nine rebounds.

“I think we’re in general they’re trying really, really hard -- and they did it last night -- to try to win a basketball game, but it’s poor execution, it’s not real poised,” Donahue said. “[It’s an] inexperienced kind of effort that you can see, in particular when it gets critical [at] times, we get sped up. I thought Brown’s poise in their understanding of the 40-minute ebbs and flows of the game was much better than ours.”

The Bears certainly kept their poise when it got tight in the second half, breaking open their largest lead of their game in the final minutes after responding to Penn’s final surge with an 11-2 run of their own.

Holding up its reputation as the best team in the nation at getting to the foul line, Brown (10-8, 1-1) sunk 24 of 26 free throws on the night, led by Brandon Anderson and Steven Spieth, who went a combined 16-for-17 from the stripe to finish with performances of 21 and 20 points, respectively.

“It seems like our two teams always play an up and down, competitive game, and tonight was no different,” Brown head coach Mike Martin said. “We just happened to make a few more shots, and obviously getting to the foul line helped.”

Overall, it was a good bounce-back game and first conference win of the season for the Bears, who lost to Yale by 31 on Friday night.

Penn, meanwhile, has seen its three losses in Ivy League play come after three consecutive victories over Central Florida, Drexel and Fairfield to close out 2016.

Though there were positives on Saturday night, the team has some significant tuning up to do with a pair of Big 5 games coming up next week and a long stretch of Ivy League games coming right after.

“I think what you saw tonight was we’re not a finished product,” Donahue said. “There’s very basic, fundamental things that we have to get much better at to compete in this league. And we don’t have it yet, but we’ll get there.”

Donahue listed floor awareness, spacing, and poise as areas needing attention on offense, noting that he’s focused on the teaching and long-term improvement of the program.

At the same time, however, he recognizes that there are only 11 conference games left for the Quakers to recover.

With qualification to the inaugural, Palestra-hosted Ivy League tournament at stake, the 2017 postseason is not something Penn wants to miss out on.

They have a long way to go in order to make that dream a reality.

“No one’s been through this where the top four teams make it, no idea what it’s going to take,” Donahue said. “All I know is that obviously we’ve got to start playing much better basketball if we’re going to get in that Ivy League tournament.”

“We’re going to work our tails off over the next three weeks to get ourselves back in this.”