City of Basketball Love

Joey Piatt (@joey_piatt)
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It was gritty, sloppy, and full of turnovers — and neither team looked like it could do enough to win — but when the final buzzer sounded, La Salle emerged from Tuesday night’s Big 5 battle in the Palestra with a 63-49 victory over Penn. 

For the Explorers, the game was an important confidence boost for a team that entered Tuesday night with a 3-3 record and a plethora of offensive struggles. In its first six games, La Salle’s field goal percentage eclipsed .400 just once and in half of those contests, the team failed to top .300 shooting from beyond the arc. 

While their shooting woes weren’t totally sorted out on Tuesday night — the team shot 21 of 55 from the field and 8 of 28 from three — the Explorers made key shots when it counted. 

“To struggle for seven-straight games offensively and find a way to be 4-3, I’m proud of them,” coach Mountain MacGillivray said. “The ball hasn’t been going in very well for us, but we found a way in the fourth quarter to make a bunch of shots.”

Headlining the effort for La Salle was senior forward Kayla Spruill, who led the team with 17 points on the back of perfect 8-8 shooting from the charity stripe. The Jacobs sisters, Amy and Claire, also added to the Explorers’ scoring, with six and seven points, respectively. 

The Explorers’ fourth-quarter effort, during which they outscored Penn 26-6, was filled with hustle plays and smart basketball. Junior forward Jordon Lewis and senior guard Molly Masciantonio stepped up late; Lewis converted a critical and-one that started La Salle’s run, and Masciantonio added a late 3-pointer to help put the game away. 

It was the result of a team that had embraced the nature of the game it found itself playing. 

The Big 5 is built on passion and grit and on games where the big play steps aside in favor of the hustle play. MacGillivray quickly realized that Tuesday night’s game wouldn’t be a typical road trip, and he adjusted his game plan accordingly, delivering a halftime speech that put the onus on his players to win the game the way it was being played. 

“I just said, ‘I can’t draw up how to get a loose ball right now, you have to win that battle,’” MacGillivray said. “I can’t draw up boxing out, we work on it every day.”

The result? The team’s first road win this season, and the first of what MacGillivray hopes will be four Big 5 victories. 

“We went on the road and got our first road win, showed that we can win on the road,” MacGillivray said. “For our kids to win on the road when it wasn’t going well for most of the game, that’s got to be a confidence booster going forward.

“I’m feeling like it’s an opportunity to get three more [Big 5 wins] and be able to celebrate something.”

Before the Explorers can build on their Big 5 success, they must first make a Saturday trip to play winless Saint Francis. Their next Big 5 game comes Dec. 21 at home against Villanova.

Like La Salle, Penn played the hustle game on Tuesday night, cleaning the glass and forcing turnovers. The Quakers outrebounded their Big 5 rival 48-32 and tallied 11 steals against the Explorers. But for every rebound collected and turnover forced, Penn missed a shot. For a team that was averaging 71.7 points per game, with an average scoring margin of 15.5, it was an uncharacteristic performance. 

“I just didn’t think we had any fluidity to us on the offensive side...our offense is really struggling,” head coach Mike McLaughlin said. “We held the ball too long, we did not move the ball, we didn’t cleanly reverse it, and played poor offense.”

Part of the problem on offense was the absence of leading scorer Kayla Padilla, who recently earned her second Big 5 Player of the Week honor of the season and who was coming off a 36-point performance where she set the program record for threes made in a game. Padilla, along with starting point guard Niki Kovacikova and several other upperclassmen, were sitting in accordance with the four-game suspensions that have forced McLaughlin to get creative with his lineups.

Early on, it seemed like Penn could work around its missing players. The team entered Tuesday 4-2, with its only losses coming by four points to Big 5 foe Villanova and in overtime against Memphis. But against La Salle, the team struggled to replace the offense it was missing. 

Jordan Obi and Mia Lakstigala, both of whom entered averaging double figures, scored a combined 32 points, providing the team’s only source of offense. The team’s third-leading scorer, Mandy McGurk, totaled eight points on 4-15 shooting. After those three, no Penn player had more than three points, and one starter, Kennedy Suttle, was held scoreless despite averaging 10 points per game in the team’s first six contests. 

“I really thought the first six games, regardless of who we had, I thought we competed at a really good level,” McLaughlin said. “Tonight, I thought we got outworked...I think we deserve to learn this, because I didn’t think we were at our best.”

Fortunately for the Quakers, there is just one game left on the team’s schedule — a Friday road trip to play Bucknell — before the team is back at full strength for its Dec. 5 matchup against Duke. At that point, with Padilla playing alongside Obi, the two-time Ivy League Rookie of the Week, the team should have no trouble getting its offense back on track. 

Although many things didn’t go Penn’s way on Tuesday night, there was one bright spot. Freshman guard Stina Almqvist, a Sweden native who had never been to Penn before this year, was surprised early Tuesday by her father, who — with the help of McLaughlin and the rest of the Quakers — flew in for the game. 

“All the girls that didn’t have class at that time stood there and dad was behind them,” McLaughlin said. “I was behind them; I walked her down. She thought she was coming to a film session, and then it was one of [those] moments.”

When Almqvist entered the game at the start of the third quarter, she wasted no time in making some key plays in front of her father. The freshman scored Penn’s first points of the half on a second-chance layup. A few plays later, she made an impact on the defensive end, notching a block. Her five minutes on the floor provided a silver lining on an otherwise rough night for the Quakers. 

“I thought it was really one of those special things...It is pretty emotional for everyone,” McLaughlin said.