No. 1 Princeton (21-5, 12-2 Ivy) vs No. 4 Penn (17-10, 9-5 Ivy), Jadwin Gym, 4:30 p.m. (available on ESPN+)
Game #1, 1/16/23: Princeton (home) over Penn, 55-40
Game #2, 3/3/23: Princeton over Penn (home), 71-52
penn
Ivy women’s week 10 roundup: Ancient Eight’s top 10
Heading into the last two days of the regular season, Columbia and Princeton were tied for first, while Penn held a one-game lead over Harvard for third place. After the Lions, Tigers and Crimson each grabbed a win, the Ivy League Tournament semifinal matchups of Columbia against Harvard and Princeton versus Penn had been set. What needed to be determined was the seeding of the four teams and the timing of the two matchups.
When the updated NCAA NET rankings were posted on Sunday morning, Princeton’s convincing road victory over upper division Penn combined with Columbia’s narrow escape at home against seventh-place Cornell resulted in the Tigers overcoming an 11-position difference from last week and taking the No. 1 seed away from the Lions.
A banner(s) weekend for Princeton basketball
Thanks to a weekend sweep of Penn, the Princeton men’s and women’s basketball programs both won Ivy League titles this weekend, meaning that two more banners will soon be added to the crowded rafters at Jadwin Gym. Here are four takeaways from Princeton’s historic basketball weekend:
Ivy men’s week 10 roundup: Ancient Eight’s top 10
A wild Saturday capped the regular season for the Ancient Eight. When the dust settled, Yale and Princeton tied for the league title, while Penn settled for third place and Cornell captured the final spot for this weekend’s Ivy League Tournament at Jadwin Gymnasium.
In what was arguably the conference game of the year, it was the worst of times in the opening half and the best of times in the second stanza for the hometown Tigers.
Script flipped: How Princeton men pulled off Ivy title-clinching comeback over Penn
Down Go Those Nets! ✂️#MakeShots 🐯🏀 pic.twitter.com/po8escJul4
— Princeton Men’s Basketball (@PrincetonMBB) March 4, 2023
Our George “Toothless Tiger” Clark recaps what Princeton coach Mitch Henderson called the best win he’s ever had, a 76-69 victory over archrival Penn to clinch a second straight Ivy League title and the 29th in program history:
Three Quakeaways from Penn men’s colossal collapse at Princeton
PRINCETON, N.J. — It is hard to envision a more disheartening end to an Ivy League regular season than the collapse Penn orchestrated on Saturday at Jadwin Gymnasium.
The Quakers (17-12, 9-5 Ivy) squandered a 17-point second-half lead before falling in overtime to Princeton (19-8, 10-4), 77-69, handing a share of the Ivy regular season title to their most bitter rivals.
Penn’s undoing was an offensive outage when it mattered most. After sophomore guard George Smith hit a contested layup to extend the Quakers’ edge to 66-58 with 4:16 to go, the team did not make a shot from the field for the remainder of regulation or overtime, a 9:16 stretch.
The Quakers are now locked into the No. 3 seed for next Saturday’s Ivy League Tournament, which will also be held at Jadwin. They will either get a third crack at Princeton or a rubber match against Yale, depending on the result of Yale’s Saturday night road game against Brown.
All the good feelings from Penn’s eight-game winning streak have disappeared in a flash, replaced by a handful of mostly painful Quakeaways:
Princeton women push back to power past Penn, 71-52
Editor’s note: Princeton-Penn is always a big deal, and our Toothless Tiger and Palestra Pete combine to recap Saturday night’s P vs. P action in audio and written form below:
It was The Kaitlyn Chen Show, but more than that, it was The Princeton Defense Show at Penn on Friday night, and the Tigers roared back (sorry) from a first-half deficit to beat the Quakers handily, 71-52.
In some respects, the game was meaningless: For weeks we’ve known that the top two women’s teams going into the Ivy League Tournament would be Princeton and Columbia, and that they would face Penn and Harvard in the first-round games. But pride counts, too, and Princeton knew it needed this win to get a share of its fifth straight regular-season title.
On the Penn side, too, the stakes were emotional: This was Senior Night, and Princeton was the only Ivy the graduating Penn players had never beaten. Truth is, they’d never come very close: The 15-point loss in January at Princeton was their closest score. Their best chance probably would have come in the COVID-canceled Ivy tournament of 2020, or more likely the canceled season that followed, when the career of Penn’s last dominant center, Eleah Parker, would have overlapped with that of forward Jordan Obi.
Ivy women’s week nine roundup: Ancient Eight’s Top 10
The conference’s next-to-last weekend began on Friday night with a nationally televised game between Princeton and Harvard, two of the four teams headed to the Ivy Tournament. The last time they met in January, the Crimson came away with a 67-59 victory, ending the Tigers’ 42-game Ivy League win streak.
Playing in front of more than 1,700 fans at Jadwin Gymnasium, Harvard took a 14-12 lead after the first quarter. The visitors used a late 13-2 run to open up a 12-point lead before Princeton cut it to 10, 30-20, at the half.
Penn women get through warmup at Dartmouth, 54-37
It was a game of limited importance. The Penn women, in third place and assured of a spot in the Ivy tournament, made the long road trip to Hanover, N.H., for what was supposed to be a tune-up at Dartmouth, which had yet to win an Ivy game.
But Penn wasn’t playing like a team contending for a title Saturday — shooting poorly and turning the ball over repeatedly coming off a disappointing loss at upstart Brown a week earlier.
Penn held just a one-point lead when Dartmouth junior guard Mia Curtis grabbed the rebound after a Penn miss with three seconds on the clock and hustled the ball downcourt to senior forward Emma Koch for the layup at the buzzer — putting the Big Green ahead, 12-11, after one quarter.
Three Quakeaways from Penn men taking care of business in win over Dartmouth
PHILADELPHIA — Penn is one win away from at least a share of the Ivy League regular season championship after a businesslike 89-79 win over Dartmouth at the Palestra on Senior Day.
The Quakers never trailed after the 16-minute mark of the first half, but there were some dicey moments along the way. At one point, a 9-0 Big Green run midway through the second half cut the visiting team’s deficit to 64-61 and forced Penn coach Steve Donahue into a timeout with 9:19 to play.
Coming out of the break, junior forward Max Martz proved to be Penn’s stopper.
Martz got a mismatch in the post against Dartmouth’s Ryan Cornish, backed down the guard and drained a righty hook to extend the Red and Blue’s lead back to five. He then went on to add two three-pointers from the corner and a second jumper over the next four-plus minutes to hold Dartmouth at bay. Martz finished the afternoon with 18 points and a team-high KenPom offensive rating of 163 points per 100 possessions.
Penn will need a performance like that from Martz next Saturday at Princeton in arguably the team’s biggest regular-season game in five years.
During the long wait, Quakers fans will have plenty to ruminate on, such as how …