Quakeaways from No. 3 Penn men’s basketball defeating No. 2 Harvard to advance to Ivy League Tournament final

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ITHACA, N.Y. — Penn men’s basketball is 40 minutes away from its first trip to the NCAA Tournament in eight years after outlasting Harvard in a 62-60 overtime thriller to advance to the Ivy League Tournament final.

Sophomore point guard AJ Levine — more on him later — played the hero after he blew by Harvard sophomore guard Ben Eisendrath off the dribble for a scoop layup with 6.1 seconds to play in the extra session.

With the Crimson in scramble mode, Levine got a hand in Harvard guard Tey Barbour’s face as the sniper put up a three-point attempt to win the game.

Barbour’s shot was off line to the right and a wild celebration ensued.

The Quakers (17-11) are now in a position that few expected them to be in back in November. What did we learn about this team as it preps for an empty-the-tank game against Yale for a conference tournament championship?

This is officially a good defensive team.

The rubber match against Harvard (17-12) was, as expected, another rock fight. After holding the Crimson to 0.85 points per possession two weeks ago at the Palestra, the Quakers forced Harvard into a 0.86 point-per-possession showing on Saturday.

Penn played stingy on-the-ball defense in the half-court, throwing opportunistic double-teams which seemed to disrupt Harvard’s offense, especially in the first half.

The Quakers’ three-point defense was stellar, too, as Harvard finished with just eight makes on 31 attempts. Many of those, like Barbour’s final shot, were heavily contested.

Though Penn didn’t generate a ton of transition opportunities on live-ball giveaways, it still forced 17 Harvard giveaways and finished with a plus-nine turnover margin.

Though there are still a few trouble spots — especially defending the paint — the Quakers sit on Saturday afternoon 112th in overall defensive efficiency on KenPom, up more than 210 slots from last season. In fact, this team ranks higher in defensive efficiency than any of coach Fran McCaffery’s final three teams at Iowa.

The Quakers have a special level of resilience, both individually and personally.

Levine was an especially unlikely hero on Saturday. Though the sophomore guard has improved tremendously throughout the season, he had gotten himself pulled from the game midway through the second half after a series of overly aggressive plays on both offense and defense.

The Quakers erased a five-point Harvard lead after the final media timeout of the second half and built an early lead in overtime with freshman Jay Jones filling Levine’s role. Jones got a critical and-one bucket on the opening possession of overtime but hurt his ankle during the extra frame, forcing McCaffery to go back to Levine.

That Levine executed when the game mattered most and mentally erased all of his earlier struggles is a testament to how far he’s come emotionally over the course of this season.

“I had missed a couple earlier in the game, but I knew this is what the stakes were, and I knew there was no way I was missing that to send us to a ‘chip,’” Levine said about the game’s decisive play during a postgame press conference.

Speaking of emotions, the Quakers were able to withstand an emotional gut punch when the news emerged on Friday that leading scorer Ethan Roberts had shown more concussion symptoms and did not travel to Ithaca.

Though scoring was certainly an uphill battle with Roberts back in Philadelphia, the Quakers duct-taped together just enough scoring to win. Special mention has to go to wing Michael Zanoni, who hit a critical three-pointer to trim the Harvard lead late to two points, then tied the game with 55 seconds to go off a modified version of Boston Celtics general manager Brad Stevens’ “winner” set play.

“That’s what the real good teams do: They have multiple guys step up when somebody else is out,” McCaffery said. “And that’s what we did.”

No matter what happens tomorrow, this season has been a success.

It’s hard to believe just how far this team has come in just a few months under McCaffery, who inherited a squad ranked 278th by KenPom in the preseason and picked seventh in the Ivy League standings.

Does Yale have a structural advantage in the frontcourt tomorrow? Yes. Will the Quakers be heavy underdogs tomorrow against the Bulldogs? Sure.

But Penn has consistently outperformed the expectations Vegas oddsmakers have set for the team all season. It wasn’t too long ago that the Quakers were one defensive stop away from having the ball in their hands with a chance to tie or win the game against Yale in its house (granted, the Bulldogs were without Ivy Player of the Year Nick Townsend).

But the Quakers present a matchup problem in their own right. Junior TJ Power, who was a unanimous First Team All-Ivy selection in his own right, finished with a 16-point, 12-rebound double-double on Saturday. Though he had a limited scoring impact in the second half, the forward found plenty of other ways to affect the game.

For as good as Yale has been all season, the Bulldogs’ defense is surprisingly pedestrian, ranking just 190th in overall efficiency, per KenPom. The Bulldogs don’t turn teams over a ton and allow opponents to shoot a high volume of three-pointers (they allow their opponents to put up 45.3% of their field goals from long range, which is 334th out of 365 teams in Division I).

Those kinds of game conditions open the door for an elite shooter like Power to take over and deliver the Quakers to the promised land.

1 thought on “Quakeaways from No. 3 Penn men’s basketball defeating No. 2 Harvard to advance to Ivy League Tournament final”

  1. Boston Celtics GM Brad Stevens came up with that play? Wow, imagine being a fan of both the C’s and Quakers.

    Major Tommy point for Lucas Lueth on the play where he dove to save a ball and call timeout.

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