Another week, another gut-punch loss for Penn.
The Quakers were on the verge of pulling the biggest upset in Ivy League play this season before another sequence of late-game disasters sent Penn to a 72-71 defeat at Yale.
Penn (6-15, 2-6 Ivy), after another flat start, used a pair of deep Sam Brown threes to take two late leads on the Bulldogs (15-6, 8-0), but the Red and Blue never were quite able to land the killshot they needed.
Eventually, Yale made Penn pay. With the game on the line and the visitors clinging to a one-point lead, Bulldogs big man Nick Townsend found freshman wing Isaac Celiscar cutting to the hoop for an easy layup with a little more than eight seconds to play. The Quakers ran both their big men at Townsend, and Brown was just a step behind Celiscar.
Penn couldn’t even get a potential winning shot off. The Quakers had a sideout inbounds opportunity on Yale’s end of the floor with six seconds to play, but no one could get open and Ethan Roberts’ desperation pass to freshman Michelangelo Oberti was easily deflected for a game-killing turnover.
The Quakers’ devastating loss brought back plenty of bad memories, starting with how …
Penn’s offensive execution with the game on the line was abysmal.
The last time I wrote a sentence like that came in 2023, when the Quakers threw away a share of the Ivy League title thanks to a second-half meltdown at Princeton. The doom spiral Penn has been in for the past two-plus seasons can be traced directly back to that game.
In 2023, Penn inexplicably took the ball out of Ivy Player of the Year Jordan Dingle’s hands. This time around, the Quakers didn’t have much of a plan to get leading scorer Ethan Roberts involved.
The Red and Blue had the ball with a lead twice in the game’s final 90 seconds. The first time around, they burned a timeout with 14 seconds left on the shot clock. Coming out of the timeout, Penn had Brown drive on Casey Simmons, who cut him off on the baseline. Roberts flashed open for three but there was no realistic way Brown could have gotten him the ball. That possession ended with Nick Spinoso missing a desperation three.
Then, with 47 seconds to play and a one-point lead, Penn opted to play stall-ball and waste most of the shot clock more than 30 feet from the basket. Roberts had the ball for a split second, but that possession ended with Brown chucking up a contested midrange jumper over a double-team which didn’t even beat the shot clock.
Penn erased a 16-point deficit on Friday by running patient offense and using dribble penetration to generate open shots. That crispness disappeared when it mattered most.
Slow starts are killing this team.
Penn would be able to avoid pressure-packed late-game situations if it could just do its work early.
Last Friday, the Quakers spotted Princeton an 11-0 lead before the first media timeout. This time around, Penn let Yale get out to early leads of 12-2 and 26-10.
It’s hard enough to win on the road against a team as good as Yale. Chasing the scoreboard from the opening tip makes it nearly impossible.
Penn showed for long stretches on Friday that it can compete with top-end Ivy teams like Yale. The Quakers, despite their athletic limitations, finished with a plus-six rebounding margin. They got tons of high-quality looks from deep in the half-court.
But they had no margin for error, which made Friday’s late-game mistakes catastrophic.
Sam Brown is a reason to keep watching.
How Penn’s roster will look next season is an open-ended question. Roberts’ decision to hire an NIL agent is a strong indicator he won’t be coming back, given the Ivy League’s institutional attitude towards NIL collectives and other institutionalized approaches to getting players paid.
If Roberts bolts, Penn’s offense will likely flow through Brown. He led all scorers on Friday with 23 points and he displayed the killer instinct characteristic of elite shooters during the two NBA-range threes he canned to give the Quakers genuine hope of an upset.
But if Penn moves on from Steve Donahue at the end of the season, will Brown head for the transfer portal, too? Brown committed to Penn during his junior season at Lower Merion High School in large part due to his close relationship with the Quakers’ head coach.
That’s ultimately a question for March. In the meantime, it’s been nice to see Brown fully turn the page on a disastrous nonconference season. He’s shooting 26-for-54 from deep during Ivy play, which is the third-best mark in the conference.