Penn picked a good time to turn in its best performance of the season.
The Quakers (16-11, 8-4 Ivy) pummeled Brown on Saturday at the Palestra, 90-69, and vaulted themselves into a three-way tie for first place in the Ivy League standings.
Though neither Penn nor the league have provided official confirmation, analytics expert Luke Benz said postgame that the Red and Blue have now clinched a trip to the Ivy League tournament.
Usually, this writer uses the top of these articles to describe some pivotal moment where Penn seals either victory or defeat. The pivotal moment on Saturday was the opening tipoff. The Quakers shot out to a quick 9-0 lead and never looked back. It took a string of circus shots by the Bears (13-12, 6-6) in garbage time to trim Penn’s final margin of victory below 30 points.
Just how good were the Quakers on Saturday? BartTorvik.com, a KenPom competitor, assigns every team in Division I a game score of 0-100 for each game it plays. Think of the number as the probability a team will win through its performance on a given night.
Penn finished with a final game score of 97.
It’s all happy Quakeaways today after the Red and Blue pulled off their biggest Ivy weekend sweep in some time:
1. Penn’s offense looks the best it has all season.
On a night when the Quakers scored 90 points, soon-to-be Ivy Player of the Year Jordan Dingle finished with just 12 on nine shots. Dingle had a good reason for putting up a scoring figure well below his season average: He got most of the night off.
Coach Steve Donahue made the smart decision to let his superstar guard sit on the bench for much of the second half and get some much-needed rest on the second day of a back-to-back.
As a result, the offense primarily flowed through junior guard Clark Slajchert, sophomore forward Nick Spinoso and junior forward Max Martz. All three proved up to the challenge.
Martz looked unguardable in the post once again and recorded a double-double: 18 points on 12 shots, plus 10 boards. Slajchert looked like his confident early-season self for the second consecutive game and finished with a team-high 19 points on 13 shots.
As for Spinoso, he put up 12 points on eight shots and delivered a highlight-reel play midway through the second half with a ferocious, one-handed putback dunk after a three-point attempt by Jonah Charles rimmed out.
2. Rebounding has become a subtle strength.
Though Brown was down two frontcourt rotation players on Saturday, the Bears are still one of the better rebounding teams in Division I. Brown allows opponents to grab just 24.2% of available offensive boards, according to KenPom, 21st out of 363 Division I teams.
The Quakers didn’t care. They grabbed 13 offensive rebounds on Saturday, good for a 48.1% offensive rebounding rate. They won the overall rebounding battle, 51-23.
That +28 rebounding margin is the Quakers’ best against a D-I opponent in 49 years, according to Penn Athletics.
Penn put up similar numbers a night before against Yale, which is 12th in the country at limiting opponents on the offensive glass: 11 offensive boards and a total rebounding margin of +6.
The Quakers now sit 99th in the country in offensive rebounding percentage (30.9%). A lot of credit for that has to go to Spinoso, senior center Max Lorca-Lloyd, junior forward Andrew Laczkowski and senior swingman Lucas Monroe.
3. Same situation, different vibes.
Penn now faces the same late-season scenario it had in 2021-22: Beat Dartmouth, and you get a shot against hated Princeton for at least a share of the Ivy title.
The Quakers had no shot of passing that test last year. Dingle got a concussion in practice ahead of the Dartmouth game and Penn’s one-dimensional offense could not function without its best player.
This time around, Penn looks like a team nobody wants to face in the Ivy tournament. Though Dingle is still taking a high percentage of the Quakers’ shots, the team can credibly beat opponents on the offensive end of the floor in any number of ways. Penn can give the ball to Spinoso or Martz on the low block and expect them to score. Clark Slajchert can create his own shot. George Smith can step into an open three.
But until the Quakers prove that they can beat Princeton, there will be skeptics, and rightly so. The last time Penn beat the Tigers, Patrick Mahomes had recorded one career start as an NFL quarterback.
Though Princeton’s choke job at home against Yale helped put the Quakers into a three-way tie for first, the most likely outcome now is that Penn will be forced to play two true road games in the span of a week against a Princeton team it has not beaten in more than five calendar years.