City of Basketball Love

Josh Verlin (@jmverlin)
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Is Penn the best men’s team in the Big 5? 

Through the first three weeks of the season, it’s a mantle seemingly no one has wanted to claim: Villanova’s off to its worst start in years, dropping to 2-5 with a loss to Oregon on Sunday; Temple (3-4) beat Villanova, but has lost to Wagner and Richmond as its record dropped under .500. St. Joe’s (2-3) and La Salle (3-3), who program for whom a winning season would be a significant step forward, have yet to beat anyone notable. 

That leaves the Quakers, who became the only team in the Big 5 with a winning record on Sunday thanks to an 86-73 win over Delaware, moving them to 5-4 on the season. It’s been a nice bounce-back from Penn, who just nine days ago were 1-4 and coming off a 34-point loss at West Virginia, beating Lafayette in overtime on Tuesday before sweeping the inaugural Cathedral Classic this weekend, beating Hartford, Colgate and Delaware in the span of 50 hours. 

Nice wins, sure, though it remains to be seen if that means they’re ready for the rest of the city. It won’t take long to figure out just where Penn stands in the Big 5: the Quakers will play all four Big 5 squads in the span of 11 days, starting with a Wednesday visit from St. Joe’s and continuing at home against La Salle (Dec. 3) before trips to Villanova (Dec. 7) and Temple (Dec. 10).

Sweep them all, and Penn will be undisputed Big 5 champs for the seventh time (15 overall, including shared titles) and for the second time in five years, having gone 4-0 in 2018-19, their most recent Big 5 title of any kind.

“I thought we could get through some road games and get to this Cathedral Classic and see if we could get some momentum going, and then you can focus, it’s our own Big 5 championship run,” Penn coach Steve Donahue said after Sunday’s win. “And it’s a nice way to get your team fired up during a long season, that they can have that kind of prize at the end, if they can figure out a way to beat good teams.”

“I think we just try to focus on ourselves,” junior guard Clark Slajchert said, “but yeah, we’re very excited about the chance to win a Big 5 championship this year.

“We know, we kind of handled this part of the season, and this is [...] the next component, focus on the Big 5 the next few weeks.”

Donahue said he hadn’t gotten to see any of the other Big 5 teams this season aside from St. Joe’s, whom he watched play Lafayette as he got ready to play the Leopards last week. He’s familiar with the other program’s storylines, of course, but not too much more than that.

“It’s funny, I think all of us, I think there’s really good potential, and it looks like all of us are trying to figure it out,” Donahue said. “Villanova, in particular, [are waiting for Justin] Moore and Cam Whitemore [to] get back, I thought Temple has really good pieces and they obviously beat Villanova and a couple other teams, and I think Billy Lange [at Saint Joseph’s] has such good young players that they can drop 100 on you, and they’re just inconsistent at this point, but they’re good.”

The Quakers, who are above .500 for the first time since the end of the 2019-20 season — having only played one season since then, going 12-16 last year following the canceled COVID year — have had an interesting start to a busy fall. They got blasted by 28 at Iona in the season opener, then lost at Mizzou (92-85) and at home to Towson (80-74) to fall to 0-3. 

Progress was seemingly made as Penn went to Drexel and beat the Dragons, 64-59, but then had to play at West Virginia, where they got drilled, 92-58. A year after going 3-10 against a difficult non-conference slate, including 0-4 in the Big 5 — also played right in a row, from Dec. 1 to Dec. 11 — the Quakers were in danger of another early-season slide.

“Confidence is a difficult thing to figure out, in terms of, what comes first? Do you do well and [then] get confident, or, you’re confident [first], and you do well?” Donahue asked. “I think for this group, there had to be some results to make them feel like, hey, we’re good. 

“We skipped a grade from 6th grade to 8th grade, and meanwhile all those [other] 8th graders, they got 7th, 8th and then the 9th graders are coming back,” he continued, alluding to how the Ivy League lost a season and is also younger than other leagues, not allowing grad students to play on its teams, limiting its rosters to those largely in their first four years of college. “West Virginia, Iona, Missouri, those guys were all 24, 25, one was 26 [years old].”

Penn looked good all weekend at the Cathedral Classic, a four-team event featuring a trio of round-robin doubleheaders between their hosts and the weekend’s opponents. 

Beating Hartford, which is transitioning down to Division III, was all-but-expected; beating the two-time defending Patriot League champs in Colgate — ranked in the top 100 on KenPom — was not. Following that up a win over 169th-ranked Delaware helped boost Penn up from No. 185 after the West Virginia loss to No. 158 as of Sunday night, a solid 53 spots higher than they finished last season out of the nation’s 358 programs.

“Coming into this weekend, we were as a team really eager to try and prove that we’re a better team than we’ve shown,” Slajchert said. “I think we showed people that we’re a much better team than we’ve shown at the start of the season.”

The Quakers battled the Blue Hens on Sunday, trailing by five with 12 minutes remaining before finally taking control, a 28-9 stretch over the following eight minutes creating the separation they needed to cruise to the 13-point win, which was Donahue’s 100th on the Penn sidelines (100-84) and 300th overall (300-298) in his career.

Slajchert, coming off a 33-point outing on Saturday, led the Quakers once again with 26 points, the second-year junior shooting 10-of-15 from the floor and 4-of-7 from deep. Penn’s leading scorer on the year, Jordan Dingle (21.1 ppg), finished with 22 of his own on 7-15 shooting. 

Sophomore forward Nick Spinoso had the best game of his college career with 18 points and nine assists (both new bests) plus five rebounds, a day after dishing out eight assists in the win over Colgate. He paced an offense that racked up 21 assists against nine turnovers, with senior wing Lucas Monroe (8 points, 9 rebounds, 5 assists, 0 turnovers) chipping in nicely across the box score as well.

“I think just the way he’s slowed down, like he said, and taken advantage of where he has mismatches and getting it to us in good spots,” Slajchert said of Spinoso, a 6-9 forward. “I think me, Jordan and other guards, even our wings have gotten really good looks because of Nick and the way he’s kind of poised, giving it to us in the right spots. Our whole team owes a lot to how Nick has been playing lately, for sure.”

Penn’s game against St. Joe’s on Wednesday night will be the second half of a doubleheader that begins with Temple playing La Salle at 6 PM. It’ll be the 10th game in 24 days for Penn, which after its Big 5 stretch ends only plays D-III Wilkes on Dec. 28 before starting Big 5 play on Jan. 2 at Brown.

“I think we’ll be the only team in the country that plays 10 games in November,” Donahue said. “I think it’s us and the Spurs.”