PHILADELPHIA – There isn’t exactly a large sample size of Ivy League transfers from Duke (or Virginia for that matter), so when TJ Power signed with Penn last spring, the bar was set pretty high.
Power has been very good for the Quakers this season, but perhaps not great. He’s probably behind Nick Townsend of Yale and Robert Hinton of Harvard (and maybe Cornell’s Cooper Noard) in the Ivy Player of the Year race.
Friday, however, Power put everything together, dominating throughout and taking over the game in the second half as Penn put itself on the precipice of a return to the Ivy League Tournament for the first time since 2023 with an 80-71 come-from-behind win over Dartmouth at the Palestra.
Penn (14-11, 7-5) would clinch a spot in Ithaca with a win in one of its last two contests and might get in without it (if Columbia suffers one more loss). But for Penn coach Fran McCaffery in his first year at the helm on 33rd Street, it’s just about getting better and everything else will take care of itself.
“Our goal is always to win the next game and that’s it,” McCaffery said. “If you win the next game, you’ll qualify for pretty much everything.”
Dartmouth was taking care of business early, hitting six of its first 10 three-pointers to race to a 40-29 lead late in the first half. Cameron McNamee – who had never scored double digits in an Ivy game – had 14 to that point, including 4-for-4 from behind the arc.
The Big Green still led 42-34 at the intermission, and Jayden Williams opened the second half with a triple to push the advantage back to double digits.
But Power was just getting started.
He scored 22 the rest of the way to finish with 38 points and 12 rebounds. No other Penn player got into double digits until the final seconds with Michael Zanoni hit a pair of free throws. For Power, who played his freshman year at Duke and sophomore year at Virginia, confidence was tough at first at his third school in as many seasons.
“I never recruited anyone harder than him,” McCaffery said. “I thought he was a great fit for our system, and his versatility was on full display tonight. He’s got the ultimate green light, and you heard him say it, that’s what builds confidence and you don’t do that if you’re jerking him in and out. I want him to think for himself. He learned a lot the last two years, yeah, he didn’t play much, but he learned a lot, and his leadership here has been impactful for everyone else.”
Said Power: “There’s been a lot of downs in the past couple years, you can say that. There was a lot of soul-searching, so a game like this is a great feeling. I don’t think the pressure is off. I’m just not paying attention to it as much this year.”
Dartmouth (11-14, 5-7) tried multiple players and multiple different ways to stop Power, but he looked every bit the five-star recruit he was in high school, scoring in the paint and going 6-for-8 from behind the arc.
“They put him in spacing in the middle of the floor and he made some plays,” McLaughlin said. “He made some threes off ballscreen switches. He’s a top-20 player in the country in high school three years ago, and we’ll watch film and think we could have done some things better, but he made plays.”
Meanwhile, the Big Green looked totally discombobulated on the offensive end after halftime, particularly star Kareem Thomas, who struggled again with just eight points on 3-for-11 shooting. At one point, Dartmouth coach David McLaughlin took him out to give him a mental breather after missing a layup.
“There’s missing shots and there’s finishing plays,” McLaughlin said. “And that’s finishing plays on both ends of the floor. If you don’t make a shot, you still have to play really hard on the defensive end of the floor. When shots aren’t falling, we still have confidence in these guys, but we just have to dig deep and keep playing hard.”
And so the passing of the lead seemed inevitable, but it took until a Jay Jones driving layup at the eight-minute mark to finally give Penn the advantage at 61-59.
The home team never trailed again.
Dartmouth shot just 8-for-24 from the field (and 10-for-17 from the free throw line) after halftime, and even that showing was inflated by some late uncontested makes.
The Big Green will almost definitely (unless Cornell loses to Brown Saturday and a couple of other things happen) have to win their last two games to return to Ivy Madness, but if they finish 7-7, they will hold the tiebreaker over Cornell with a sweep (the two meet next Saturday).
But they have to beat Princeton – albeit a Tigers team that has lost five straight and lost to the Big Green last season at Jadwin Gym Saturday night to make that last game meaningful. It’s a situation they were in last year and got the job done, so as down as they looked to end Friday’s game, tomorrow’s another day, as the cliche goes.
“It’s all about resiliency. We just have to go compete,” McLaughlin said. “We’ve had back-to-backs now a few times this year, and it will be all about mindset and competing.”
Brandon Mitchell-Day led the Big Green with 23 points and eight rebounds, while McNamee had 18 before fouling out.
Penn got just eight points from Ethan Roberts, but McCaffery praised his bench, including Lucas Lueth, who scored just one point and didn’t attempt a shot in 14 minutes but got six rebounds and was a general nuisance on the defensive end in the second half.
The Quakers host Harvard Saturday with a long, long shot to share the regular-season Ivy title, but getting to Ivy Madness was on Power’s mind since the day he signed with Penn.
“When you’re on the cusp like that, it’s a belief thing,” Power said. “Everyone is believing right now, and it shows how we’re playing. When I came here, one of the first things I said is that we have to change our mindset to what our standard is. I thought about Ivy Madness all the way back when I committed. That’s why I came here. Now that we’re close, we can feel it, but we have to stay focused.”