City of Basketball Love

Josh Verlin (@jmverlin)
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Without a doubt, this has been the darkest era in Penn basketball’s storied history. The past decade has been one the entire program is all too eager to forget: just one winning season (2011-12), zero Ivy League titles, zero NCAA Tournament berths. No banners to hang in the Palestra -- and not many fans to play in front of, either. Of the eight worst seasons in Penn hoops’ past (by winning percentage), four of them have come since 2009.

The past few years have seen teases of potential, the glimmers of light at the end of the tunnel. Two strong recruiting classes brought in by head coach Steve Donahue, who took over in 2015 from an ineffective Jerome Allen. A five-game win streak late in Ivy League play last year was enough to get the Quakers into the inaugural tournament, but they weren’t quite ready just yet to conquer the new powers of the Ancient Eight: Yale and Harvard, or Princeton, the old foe.

So far, 2017-18 has been different. Just how different is still to be determined, but there’s no denying that through the first two months of the season, Penn looks like it is finally turning the corner.

A 105-52 thrashing of Delaware State on Wednesday night lifted the Quakers to 9-4 this season. It’s the program’s best record through 13 games since 2001-02, when they finished 25-7 and won the Ivy League title for the sixth of what would be 10 times under Fran Dunphy’s guidance. After losing the first two games of this year, Penn has won nine of 11.

That comes on the heels of that strong finish to 2016-17, when they won six of eight to close out the regular season before taking eventual champ Princeton to overtime in the league semifinals.

For the first time in a long time, the Quakers have some momentum. And a little bit of swagger.

“Confidence is built up over time, it snowballs, and it’s something we’ve just got to work on every day,” senior wing Sam Jones said. “Because you can lose it in one game.”

Both Donahue and Jones said it’s a confidence that runs up and down the Quakers’ 20-man roster. It has to, considering the ever-changing nature of the bench rotation.

Of the 21 players on Penn’s roster, only six have played in all 13 games -- the five starters, plus senior Caleb Wood, who plays about 15 minutes per game off the bench. Four others have played in nine or more games; a fifth, freshman Eddie Scott, would be at that number were it not for an injured left wrist.

Donahue was able to play just about all his healthy bodies against Delaware State, with 16 Quakers seeing minutes. But that’s not going to happen often, if at all, in Ivy League play.

“I would love to do this every night, play everybody,” Donahue said. “But I do give credit to the guys, there has been volume, ups and downs personally, [that] have not affected their role on their team.”

Jones is a perfect example of that mentality.

The Gilbert (Ariz.) native, a sharpshooting 6-7 wing has been everything from a full-time starter to going multiple games without seeing the floor, seen games where he hasn’t been able to make an impact when he gets on the floor to those where he’s the hottest player on the court. And he’s not the only one on the roster who’s had such fluctuation in his roles and minutes over the past few years.

So far, Jones’ senior season has been something of a roller-coaster ride of its own. He played three minutes in the season opener against Fairfield and then sat the next two, before reappearing for 10 minutes of a blowout win over Penn State-Brandywine. But lately, he’s back in the rotation, going 5-of-6 from 3-point range in a Dec. 9 win at Dayton and then scoring nine points on 3-of-7 3-point shooting against Delaware State, getting his minutes with the first and second units rather than the third and fourth which played the final 15 minutes.

“I know my role on the team, whatever it is, I’m going to be there every night,” Jones said. “Whether it’s playing zero minutes, playing 100 minutes, I’m just going to do my best, work hard every day.

“I think everyone on the team has that swagger about us, we all love each other and we’re all good friends and we’re all invested in each other, and we’re all going to work hard and that’s pretty much how the team runs.”

It certainly seems like the Quakers are clicking at the right time, with the Ivy League opener against Princeton just a week away (Fri., Jan. 5). True, Delaware State is not much of a quality opponent -- the Hornets are rated the third-worst program in Division I by KenPom. But Penn did more than just win big, it romped, hitting more than 60 percent from the floor and 50 percent from 3-point range while holding its opponent below 35 percent overall and 25 percent from deep.

Remember, this is still a program that hasn’t finished above .500 since 2011-12, when Zack Rosen led Penn to a 20-13 (11-3 Ivy) season and a berth in the College Basketball Invitational, a third-tier postseason tournament. Nobody on the current roster has been part of a winning Division I basketball team. Winning big might have looked easy on Wednesday night, but it's easier yet to forget that it was just a few years ago where Penn was struggling to beat those teams by even a couple points.

“Obviously it’s been hard, this is our first winning season in a long time, it’s obviously been hard,” Jones said. “Man, I feel like it’s when you grow and you get older, you just understand it’s all about the team, nothing about you. Especially at Penn.

“This place is amazing, look at all the banners we’re looking at right now,” he continued, gesturing at the dozens hanging from the Palestra’s 89-year-old rafters. “No one really remembers one player, everyone remembers Penn. That’s what we’re all about.”

For Jones, the rebuild takes on an even more personal slant.

In high school career at Gilbert Christian, he was part of a senior class that helped the Knights go from the smallest classification of Arizona high school athletics up to the second-biggest, winning state championships as sophomores and juniors. By the time he left high school, Jones said, players like current Duke freshman Marvin Bagley III were considered attending Gilbert Christian. The Knights were on the map.

“I came in with a big group of guys who was known in our state of Arizona, and we kind of wanted to build the program and make it well-known in the state and I think we did that, we really accomplished that mission,” Jones said. “It was the kind of thing I wanted to bring here.”

It’s clear that if this isn’t the Penn team to finally break through and reclaim the Ivy crown, the future is still plenty bright. The Quakers’ top two scorers, Ryan Betley and A.J. Brodeur, are both sophomores; several seasoned juniors and a number of promising freshmen also make up a healthy part of the rotation.

The 2018 graduating class might not go down as one of the best in Quakers’ history, either from a winning or talent standpoint. But they might leave it as the one that saw the program go from winning nine games in their freshmen years to bringing Penn basketball back first to competitiveness and then into the running for a league championship.

“[We] might not be the most talented team of all times, but we’re all together, and I really applaud our senior class for doing that,” Jones said. “It’s been a rough road but it’s satisfying seeing the young guys doing well and the program’s going to leave in a good spot -- so far, hopefully.”

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The win over Delaware State Penn’s first time hitting the triple-digit mark since Jan. 16, 2006, a 105-73 win over Lafayette. And as such, it was the first time in nearly 12 years that all those in attendance at the Palestra won free cheesesteaks at Abner’s, a promotion the University City institution had been running since the 90s. (An Abner’s employee who answered the phone later that night confirmed that “over 100” fans showed up to claim theirs.)

Penn came awfully close to reaching 100 points in November, beating Penn State-Brandywine 99-40, holding the ball for the final 20 seconds with Donahue admitting afterwards he wasn’t aware the cheesesteak promotion still existed. This time, there were no such doubts. Ray Jerome hit the special one, a 3-pointer with three minutes left to put the Quakers at 102 points.

“Ray Jerome’s going to go down in Penn basketball history as one of the three or four guys who got the guys cheesesteaks,” Donahue said. “I’m sure he’s proud of that.”