PHILADELPHIA — Penn has developed a knack for playing games down to the wire in less than ideal circumstances.
Winning those games? That’s been a different story.
The Quakers rallied from 12 points down in the second half to force overtime against Belmont on Saturday but never led in the extra session en route to a tough 84-79 loss in the Cathedral of College Basketball Classic.
Penn (4-3) had the ball down three points with about 17 seconds to go in overtime but couldn’t get a potential tying three-pointer up in the air after a broken play led to a backcourt violation; junior forward Nick Spinoso, who was mostly brilliant on Saturday, was charged with the turnover.
Close games like the ones Penn has played recently — at Maryland Eastern Shore, versus Lafayette, and now versus Belmont — have a ton of variance, and frankly, are often decided by luck. Penn wouldn’t have even gotten to overtime if not for Belmont’s Isaiah Walker bricking a pair of free throws with 3.3 seconds left to play in regulation in a tied game.
But there are some key signals Penn fans can identify through the noise, such as how …
Big men are a big problem on the defensive end.
Penn’s defensive metrics have cratered over the past few weeks. Per KenPom, the Quakers are surrendering an opponent-adjusted 108.2 points per 100 possessions on defense, which is 273rd out of 362 teams. That’s nearly as bad as the 2021-22 Penn team, which finished 295th.
A big contributor to that slide has been Penn’s inability to cover athletic big men. On Saturday, Belmont’s Malik Dia was the best player on the floor. The Vanderbilt transfer came off the bench to drop a career-high 27 points on 15 shots and beat the Red and Blue every way possible: turnaround jumpers, three-pointers and one vicious hammer dunk on a roll to the basket.
Penn got back in the game in part because Belmont inexplicably stopped giving Dia touches in the second half. The Bruins wised up and gave the sophomore the ball in overtime. Dia scored the first two buckets of the extra session and put Penn behind the eight-ball the rest of the way.
Dia’s dominance came one day after the Quakers let Lafayette 7-footer Justin Vander Baan score a career-high 28 points on 22 shots.
Spinoso has developed into a solid rim protector — his block rate on defense ranks 99th in the country nationally, per KenPom — but he has been at his best defending in traditional post-up situations and as a help defender. The Quakers need to figure out a way to limit the damage against athletic bigs with shooting range like Dia who can stretch their defense.
The Quakers will ultimately live and die by their top guards.
The biggest factor in Penn’s loss on Saturday may have been its sluggish start offensively.
After scoring on their first three trips down the floor, the Quakers promptly went on a scoring drought that lasted 6:18, which allowed Belmont to put together an extended 13-0 run.
Both senior Clark Slajchert and freshman Tyler Perkins got off to rough starts shooting the basketball.
They went a combined 3-for-14 from the field in the first half. Both came alive in the second half, which sparked the Quakers’ rally. Perkins finished with 25 points, while Slajchert wound up with 21.
That the Quakers managed to finish the game scoring 1.1 points per possession despite that ugly first-half stretch shows how high the team’s offensive ceiling is when both Slajchert and Perkins are on their games.
The first half, though, is proof positive that this team cannot put up consistent offense when both of those guards are struggling to shoot.
Penn showed it might be making progress at solving its biggest offensive problem.
That fateful final possession aside, Penn did an excellent job at protecting the ball on Saturday.
The Quakers committed just eight turnovers against Belmont, which translated to Penn giving the ball away on a season-low 11.1% of their offensive possessions, per KenPom. On Friday against Lafayette, Penn committed nine giveaways for a 14.3% turnover rate, which had been the team’s previous low.
A lot of credit for that has to go to Spinoso, who looked like his best version of himself on Saturday.
Though Spinoso was credited with four turnovers, he matched that with four assists and had total command of the offense. Spinoso also finished a near-perfect 10-for-11 on two-pointers on Saturday, which pushed his season two-point field goal percentage against Division I opponents above 60%.