Penn men’s basketball left no doubt on Friday night that it is a serious contender to win the Ivy League Tournament with a relatively easy blowout road win over Brown, 82-61.
The game itself? Well, it meant nothing in the standings. The Quakers (16-11, 9-5 Ivy) have been locked into a No. 3 vs. No. 2 game with Harvard in the league’s conference tournament for roughly a week. The Bears (9-18, 3-11) already were a cinch for last place.
Penn allowed Brown to score on its first possession but never trailed again.
Instead of expounding at length on the minutiae of the Quakers’ regular season finale itself, we’ll use these Quakeaways to spin forward and set expectations for what Penn will need to do to beat the Crimson and set itself up for a shot at its first trip to the NCAA Tournament since 2018.
Use TJ Power to stretch the floor.
That’s a fairly obvious statement, isn’t it?
Power put the finishing touches on what should be an All-Ivy campaign with a 17-point showing on Friday night. The junior forward drained five three-pointers against the Bears on five attempts, including a couple of deep ones in transition.
The efficiency numbers for Power this season are nothing short of spectacular for a player who uses possessions as much as he does. He wound up with a KenPom offensive efficiency rating of 117 points per 100 possessions in Ivy games — 18th in the league — and led the league in three-point shooting percentage (47.7% on 86 attempts) in conference play.
Power, who stands at 6-foot-9, is two inches taller than any of Harvard’s starters. The Crimson used a mix of defenders on the junior when these two teams met last week, but any possession in which Penn can get Power matched up on Harvard’s best big, Thomas Batties II, and pull him out of the paint will be a victory.
Dictate the game on defense with ball-side pressure.
The Quakers erased a 10-point halftime deficit against Harvard last week in large part due to ramped up defensive intensity in the early stages of the second half. Per KenPom, the Crimson turned the ball over on 26.6% of their offensive possessions during that 64-61 Quakers win. Harvard turned the ball over on 17.2% of their offensive possessions over the course of the season.
Friday night’s domination of Brown was more of the same. The Quakers racked up 19 steals as a team and forced the Bears into 23 turnovers — good for an absurd 32% turnover rate. Brown is one of the worst offensive teams in the country, but those numbers are stellar regardless of opponent quality.
Sophomore point guard AJ Levine will need to be the tip of the spear next week. He picked up four steals on Friday night and now ranks 24th in the country in defensive steal percentage, per KenPom. It has been a while since the Quakers have had an athletic guard like Levine whom they can trust in isolation on the perimeter.
Coach Fran McCaffery was maligned for his Iowa teams’ defensive performance, but he currently has the Quakers ranked 123rd in defensive efficiency, per KenPom, despite inheriting the core of a team that ranked 323rd in defense last season.
Stay consistent for 40 minutes.
This goal is one that largely has eluded the Quakers all season, with the exception of a November blowout win over Drexel in Big 5 play.
Penn has had an objectively successful season from both results and predictive metrics points of view. But the Red and Blue also have had in-game stretches of stagnation which held them back from even more (including an outright Ivy League title).
Even on Friday, Penn built a first-half lead of 18 points but let the Bears trim that deficit to 10 at the halftime buzzer and then came out of the locker room disjointed on offense. Brown cut the Penn lead to five on multiple occasions in the early minutes of the second half before the Quakers could restore order.
To win a coin-flip game against Harvard next week, the Quakers will have to come out the way they did in the second half this past Saturday from the start and maintain that level of play. They’ve dug themselves out of several early holes recently but won’t have any margin for error anymore.