City of Basketball Love

Josh Verlin (@jmverlin)
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Jake Silpe’s college career has been about the concept of control: what he can control, and what he can’t.

There was nothing the Cherry Hill (N.J.) native could do about a coaching change at his school of choice, Penn, which brought a change in offensive style and philosophy. He doesn’t get a say on who’s in the starting lineup, or whether he’ll see playing time in any particular game. All of those things are outside his control.

So he sticks to what he can do.

"You can control how much you talk, you can control how much effort you put in, you can control jumping on a loose ball,” he said on Saturday night, after Penn’s 67-56 win over Saint Joseph’s. “Those are the little things that make a big impact.”

And finally, maybe, it’s making a difference for a talented high school guard who’s struggled for the better part of three years to find similar success at the next level.

From a basketball perspective, Silpe’s college career hasn’t gone quite as expected.

The pride of Cherry Hill East (N.J.) had over a dozen Division I offers heading into his senior year of high school but elected to come to Penn, committing to then-head coach Jerome Allen in July 2014, immediately after the end of the AAU season. But Allen was gone the following March after three straight single-digit win seasons, replaced by former Cornell and Boston College boss Steve Donahue.

Silpe fit in quite well in Allen’s pick-and-roll offense, which could get away with a lead guard who wasn’t necessarily a great shooter (see: Hicks, Tony). But in Donahue’s motion-based system, which doesn’t need a traditional point guard but needs guards and wings who can shoot, Silpe had some issues.

He spent his freshman year switching between the starting lineup and the bench, playing as many as 42 minutes in one game but as little as three in others; for the season, he averaged 5.0 ppg in 28 games, with 19 starts.

Silpe all but disappeared from the rotation as a sophomore, appearing in only 15 games and playing more than five minutes just seven times, never scoring in double figures; a far cry from his 1,000-point days at Cherry Hill East. It was a position Silpe was wholly unfamiliar with, and entirely unprepared for.

“When I went from a starter to the bench, it was hard,” Silpe said, “and obviously the word gets around and it’s not a good feeling...I’m close to home so a lot of people follow Penn basketball and they could see for themselves that I wasn’t playing the past two years. So people know, [though] it’s not like they’re in my ear saying ‘why aren’t you playing’ or anything.”

“But,” he continued, “you know, I just saw it as an opportunity. No one’s ever perfect and life never goes the way you think it’s going to go. Just taking that challenge and fighting back and really seeing it through, you have to embrace the whole process.”

“I have incredible respect for how he handled the last year-and-a-half, not playing, and it’s been year-round,” Donahue said. “He’s been working to get better, he hasn’t hung his head, he’s been engaged to help his teammates get better, he’s encouraging -- and he’s getting better.”

He must be, because suddenly he’s getting on the floor.

Through the first two months of the 2017-18 season, it looked Silpe was buried deep in a roster that goes 21 players deep. He appeared in just seven of Penn’s first 17 games, playing double-figure minutes twice, in blowout wins over Penn State-Brandywine and Delaware State.

But then, Silpe found himself playing 15 minutes in a Big 5 loss to Temple last Saturday, and followed that up with a 13-minute run in the win over St. Joe’s, finishing with four points and two rebounds but also coming up with a number of hustle plays, diving on the floor and tipping rebounds to teammates.

So maybe he won’t be a great 3-point shooter (30 percent in college), and perhaps he won’t be a 35-minute-per-game star, but Donahue’s finding a use for him all the same.

“He’s got an incredible ability to get every loose ball or be involved in loose balls, his communication is second-to-none...he plays the offense the way I want it, he’s our best cutter, he re-spaces, he moves the ball, he understands how to space,” Donahue said. “He’s tough-as-nails, he fits who we are. He’s got a lot of grit.”

Most importantly for Silpe, he’s not just getting on the court, he’s getting on the court for something Penn hasn’t had in quite some time: a winning basketball team. The downing of St. Joe’s lifted the Quakers to 13-6 on the season, and they’re 3-0 in Ivy League play, which they’ll resume next weekend.

If Penn wins seven of its final 11 games, it’ll secure its first 20-win regular season since 2006-07, which was also the last time the Quakers made it to the NCAA Tournament. That would also be enough to get into the Ivy League’s second-ever four-team postseason tournament, putting Penn two wins away from dancing.

And though Silpe can’t control exactly what his on-court role will be, whether he’ll continue to play or go back to the bench, he’s just happy to be along for the ride.

“Winning’s the best,” he said. “Losing stinks. That’s the goal, the goal is to win and it doesn’t matter how you do it, it doesn’t matter, at the end of the day, if you drew something up and it went as planned [or not], it’s all about winning.”