City of Basketball Love

Jerome Taylor (@ThatGuy_Rome)
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With the opportunity to put the game out of reach, Penn went to one of their few players who had more than five games of Ivy League experience: Jordan Dingle. 

Dingle had struggled from three against Yale on Saturday, but with 1:37 remaining, the sophomore hit his biggest shot of the game, a pull-up 3-pointer that pushed Penn’s lead to seven and proved to be the dagger in a 76-68 victory. 

“The read [on the play] was he went under [the screen], so I’m going to make him pay,” Dingle said about his shot. “They started making some slight comments about keep going under on me, and those are things that I take personally… you can’t do that every time against me. It may be a bad game, but I’m not a bad shooter.”

The sophomore was 0-7 from three until that shot, but Saturday’s performance was far from a bad game as Dingle finished with 31 points (13-24 fg, 4-4 ft, 1-8 3pt), tying his career high.

“I think there was a lot of miscommunication on [Yale’s] end,” Dingle said. “I don't think that they had a set way of trying to guard me today, and I noticed there were some mix-ups on defense that I just tried to take advantage of early when I saw it.”

With the win on Saturday, the Quakers (4-2 Ivy, 7-12 overall) now have the second-most wins in Ivy League play, behind a Princeton team that’s undefeated in conference play. The Quakers have already lost to Princeton, with the opportunity for revenge coming on March 5, the regular-season finale.

Although Penn’s four wins trail only Princeton’s five, Yale (2-1) and Harvard (2-2) are still equal to or better than the Quakers’ loss total.

Right now, the big blemish on Penn’s conference resume is the four-point loss to Columbia, who fell to 1-3 in the league on Saturday after a 19-point loss to Brown. 

But Penn has generally been successful so far in league play, after a tough preseason slate. Those games built continuity for the inexperienced Penn team, as Quakers head coach Steve Donahue was expecting.

“I think guys are starting to get more comfortable in their roles, and with eight first-year players we just hadn’t had the luxury of ‘we knew what this was like last year,” Donahue said.

Saturday was a bounce-back game for Dingle after scoring nine points in a loss to Columbia, 11 points in a win over Dartmouth and nine points in a loss against Princeton. But Dingle had some extra motivation coming into Saturday’s matchup. 

“I have to give a huge shout out to George [Smith], Lucas [Monroe] and Ed [Holland III], they knew I had a couple of rough games in the past, and they said that today was the day,” Dingle said. “They were in my ear the entire time leading up like ‘You’re going to off this game’ them telling me that, that constant reinforcement… gave me a lot of confidence going in.”

“He hadn’t been finishing well as you saw against Princeton, but he played well,” Penn head coach Steve Donahue said about Dingle. “And I thought this week he really concentrated on finishing, not falling, playing through contact, and when he does that, he’s as talented a player as there is in this league.”

Dingle has proven to be Penn’s primary scoring option, but the Quakers have struggled with finding secondary and tertiary options during the year. But since conference play started, the Quakers have begun to find a variety of scoring options from their starters and off the bench. 

Since joining the starting lineup at the beginning of Ivy League play, freshman George Smith has scored 11.3 ppg over the last six games. The freshman has also been tasked with defending the opposition’s best perimeter player. On Saturday, that meant matching up with the league’s leading scorer Azar Swain (19.1 ppg coming into Saturday). 

Swain finished with 12 points (3-13 FG, 1-6 3PT, 5-5 FT) in large part because of Smith’s defense. 

On the offensive end, Smith finished with 7 points(1-5 FG, 5-5 FT), but Smith’s game is far too versatile to be solely judged by the stat sheet.

“There’s a lot of things that George does that is very subtle, you have to watch the tape, he’s our best on-ball defender, he may be our best defensive rebounder, he may be our best cutter,” Donahue said. 

“He competes in every aspect of the game, like tonight. ‘Who’s going to guard Swain?’ George. and when it’s not George, there’s a dropoff. ”

Another player who has stepped up for Penn has been Clark Slajchert. Slajchert finished with 13 points off the bench and was the go-to guy for the Quakers when things started to slow down on the offensive end for Penn. The sophomore scored six straight points for the Quakers with Dingle on the bench to keep Penn on top early in the second half after Yale pulled within 3.

“That’s what Clark can do,” Donahue said. “He plays 18 minutes and gets 13 points, and he gets three or four buckets that are in the lane, and he just manufactures them, and at this level he’s great at [creating his own shot].”

The Quakers led from the 15:47 point of the first half and never gave the lead up, but they came close. After being up by as much as 13, Yale pulled within one with 7:05 remaining in regulation. 

But then Michael Moshkovitz faced up at the elbow and found Dingle on a back cut for a layup, and on the next possession, he found Smith in the same action to draw a foul. 

“I love that dude, man,” Dingle said about Smith. “He does everything out there he’s going to make very few mistakes, and you can depend on him down the stretch and for him to show the poise and maturity that he has as a freshman, just the growth over this season has been incredible and I’m happy for him.” 

Penn’s success on offense has been coming from inside the arc. So far, during conference play 59.4% of their scoring is coming from inside of the arc during Ivy League play, tops in the Ivy according to KenPom. 

“I think the threat of having so many kids that can shoot spaces it out so we can attack the rim, and we’ve always done that, and I think those are the teams that win in college basketball,” Donahue said. 

After holding off Yale, Donahue thinks his players’ comfort  in their roles has led to the early success in conference play, which directly contrasts with Penn’s non-conference struggles. 

“Our non-conference schedule was just so hard, and I think we just got overwhelmed,” Donahue said. “We were just kind of surviving with eight new players. Jordan had to drop 30 for us to survive. Now they understand the rhythm of college basketball, and we’re starting to understand how we’re going to win.”