Penn turned in its best performance of the season on Saturday, and it paid off in the form of its first win over an opponent in the KenPom top 100 since a February 2020 triumph over Yale.
The Quakers used elite scoring performances from guards Clark Slajchert and Jordan Dingle to earn an 81-69 win over Colgate at the Palestra. The contest marked an unhappy homecoming for Raiders head coach Matt Langel and assistant coaches Camryn Crocker and Trey Montgomery, all of whom had played or coached for Penn.
Colgate, which had beaten Syracuse on the road by 12 earlier in the season, entered Saturday ranked 98th in KenPom.
Now 4-4, the Quakers have won three straight contests.
What can Penn fans take away from a particularly satisfying win?
1. Penn’s three-point defense is gelling.
Penn held Colgate (4-4), one of the nation’s most efficient offensive teams, to exactly one point per possession.
How did the Quakers get there? It began with excellent defense on the perimeter.
Penn had Colgate’s best player, senior small forward Tucker Richardson, in a straitjacket all afternoon. Richardson, a high school teammate of Dingle at Blair Academy, finished 5-for-14 from the field and committed six turnovers.
Richardson, a 40.9% three-point shooter, did not make a single trey on four attempts. His only open looks were from NBA range.
Penn turned in a similarly effective performance on Colgate’s Oliver Lynch-Daniels, who led all of Division I in three-point shooting percentage last season (54.2% on 83 attempts). Lynch-Daniels went 1-for-6 from three. A lot of credit for that goes to Slajchert, who was never fazed by Colgate’s exotic screening actions.
In all, Colgate shot 4-for-16 from three. Just 28.5% of its shots came from deep, well below its season average three-point attempt rate of 41.7%.
2. It’s going to be very tough to guard the Quakers when their guards are playing well.
Both Slajchert and Dingle, for lack of a better word, went supernova on Saturday.
Slajchert turned in a career-best 33 points on 18 shots, while Dingle scored 26 points on 16 shots. The junior backcourt duo combined to hit eight threes on 15 attempts.
Dingle, who missed time in the preseason with a foot injury and badly bruised his quadriceps last week against Drexel, truly looked like himself for the first time all season despite getting doubled often.
Both Dingle and Slajchert are shoot-first guards, but the two seemed to play well off each other Saturday when they shared the floor.
You’ll be hard-pressed to find another team in the Ivy League with two starters who can threaten nightly to pull off the hyper-efficient scoring performances Dingle and Slajchert delivered.
3. Slow starts are an issue.
It briefly looked Saturday like Penn might get run out of its own gym. The Quakers spotted themselves a 13-0 deficit five minutes into the game before leaning on Dingle and junior forward Max Martz to pull themselves off the mat.
The hole marked the third time so far this season the Quakers have taken an opening punch to the mouth and forced coach Steve Donahue to burn a timeout early in the game.
Penn went down 12-0 to Missouri less than two minutes into its second game of the season and trailed Lafayette 9-0 on Tuesday nearly three minutes into the contest.
Comebacks are nice, but not necessarily a sustainable approach to winning games.
This is the Penn team that impressed the preseason Ivy pollsters. Dingle at full strength is the best guard in the League, perhaps the best player. Looks like a 3 way scrap for the 3 and 4 seeds in March, and a 2 way fight for #1. A decisive win over a typically good Colgate team is at least a mild shock. (BTW, the 3 way tussle involves Princeton, Harvard and Cornell)