Sunday will mark the first Ivy League conference basketball since March 7, 2020, even if two of the eight games in the opening slate (the Princeton at Harvard and Columbia at Yale men’s matchups) have been postponed due to COVID-19 concerns. Here’s what to watch for:
Jordan Obi
Penn women cruise in substitute game versus Ursinus
You weren’t expecting a close game, were you? If so, you were expecting the Penn women to travel to Morgan State for their first game in 20 days. But with the coronavirus shuffling and scuttling schedules, the Quakers instead were playing host to Division III Ursinus, and the result was an emphatic 89-29 Penn win.
Penn women fall to Stony Brook
The Penn women improved their play but couldn’t improve their record as an impressive Stony Brook team handed them their sixth straight loss, 75-69, Friday night on Long Island.
In easily their best of three games since their juniors and seniors returned from four-game suspensions, the Quakers (4-7) made comeback after comeback behind Kayla Padilla’s 29 points and an excellent performance — 18 points and eight rebounds — by forward Jordan Obi. Mia Lakstigala added 12 points, seven rebounds and three steals.
In fifth straight loss, Penn women fall to St. Joseph’s
It turns out that getting the gang together again wasn’t enough to solve Penn’s problems. Not even 31 points from Kayla Padilla could do it.
In their second game back after the rolling four-game suspensions of all their juniors and seniors over the season’s first eight games, the Penn women dropped their fifth straight, falling to St. Joseph’s at the Palestra, 83-70. Penn (4-6) has lost three Big 5 games, with one to play next month against Temple.
No surprise: Penn women lose to Duke
We go to college to learn, right? And the Penn women had an intensive seminar Sunday afternoon with the Duke Blue Devils, who coasted to a 77-55 win at the Palestra.
For Duke (8-0), the game had to be a nice break: The undefeated Devils’ previous game was a victory over No. 9 Iowa, and its next is against No. 1 South Carolina. Before then, I suspect the AP writers will hang a number on Duke as well. This is a team that wouldn’t be out of place playing any school in the country. (And you don’t know how it pains me to say anything nice about Duke, but even I have to give the Devils their due.)
If you were hoping for some suspense in this game, it evaporated soon after the opening tip. Penn (4-5) didn’t score a point in the first five minutes, and though Duke also got off to a slow start, the first quarter was a lopsided 22-5. A run in the second and third quarters got Penn to within 11, but that’s as good as things got.
Penn women crash and lose to La Salle, 63-49
For much of Tuesday night’s game at the Palestra, neither team deserved to win, as Penn and La Salle traded turnovers and sloppy play. But after a successful third quarter, the Quakers put on a clinic in futility and watched the Explorers run away with a 63-49 victory.
How bad was it? Let’s say you were watching online, less than a minute into the fourth quarter, when a Penn miss bounced to Mandy McGurk to the left of the lane and she scored on the putback. Then, let’s say, your power went out, or the toilet overflowed, or your narcolepsy kicked in — and when you saw the game on the screen again, Penn freshman Lizzy Groetsch was driving the lane for another basket.
That happened with 50 seconds left on the clock, and in the intervening eight-plus minutes of game time, Penn had not sunk a single bucket.
Kayla Padilla shines in homecoming as shorthanded Penn women fall to Memphis in overtime
Kayla Padilla’s spectacular 36-point performance was almost enough to complete a Penn sweep of her Los Angeles homecoming, as the Quakers fell to Memphis, 73-68, in overtime Saturday.
Padilla had a cold hand and scored a mere nine points the day before against San Diego in the teams’ opener at the Loyola Marymount Thanksgiving Classic. But Penn won that one, 60-55, on the strength of a resounding 20 points and 10 rebounds by sophomore forward Jordan Obi, Penn’s other Californian, and strong performances by seniors Mia Lakstigala and Kennedy Suttle. Lakstigala just missed a double-double herself, with nine rebounds and 13 points.
The Memphis loss was, among other things, a stark reminder of the price Penn (4-2) is paying for an unspecified infraction of university rules by the team’s upperclassmen. Each of them is serving a rolling four-game suspension over the first eight games of the season. On Friday, seniors Lakstigala, Suttle and Nikola Kovacikova grabbed 20 of Penn’s 33 rebounds; on Saturday, Penn had 38 rebounds — junior Silke Milliman, who sat out the San Diego game, grabbed 11 — but Memphis (6-1) had 53, and Memphis had 46 points in the paint to Penn’s 22.
Penn women trump King’s College
What would you consider the most important aspect of the Penn women’s easy win against King’s College, 91-55, on Tuesday night at the Palestra?
Surely not the win itself, though a loss to any Division III squad would have been an embarrassment and a flashing red sign of problems at Penn. King’s has a good team with an excellent shooting guard in Samantha Rajza, who had 20 points on 6-for-13 shooting from beyond the three-point arc. But King’s had no way to compete in the paint, so it lived and died by its three-point shots, putting up 36 of them and sinking 12.
Layoff, Shmayoff: A solid start for Ivy League hoops
Announcers and writers around the nation focused a lot of attention to the 600-plus days between games for the Ivy League. While many expected the teams to be a bit rusty out of the gates, the Ancient Eight acquitted itself quite well in the season’s first week.
Thirteen of the league’s 16 teams had at least one win, with the Princeton and Columbia women notching three victories each. The Brown men almost upset No. 19 UNC without their top player, and the Princeton men just missed out on winning the Asheville Championship.
Check out some of the highlights from a very successful and welcome week of Ivy hoops:
Penn women open with win at Hartford
After 20 months away from the game, you have to expect some rust. The reflexes aren’t as sharp; the eyes don’t take in the court as well, or as quickly. The muscle memory — fingers on the keys, jumping to the stat book — is just a bit off when the middle-aged sportswriter returns.
No rust on the Red and Blue, though. The Penn women went to Connecticut and tore through Hartford, 85-42, as if they’d never put the ball down. (The final score is a bit deceptive; Coach Mike McLaughlin pretty much pulled his starters after three quarters to give his bench game time and keep the total below 100. Hartford won the fourth quarter, 13-7.)