The Penn women’s basketball team came out of a 20-day break for finals and Christmas by beating a strong Maine squad, 72-69, Saturday afternoon at the Palestra.
Freshman point guard Mataya Gayle had the hot hand and dropped 28 points, the highest total in her short college career. But this was a team effort for the Quakers against the Black Bears, and a great game if you just love basketball: The lead changed hands 20 times in 40 minutes, with eight ties. Maine hit five of its last seven shots but had to foul repeatedly to get the ball back, and Penn staved off the charge with clutch free throws.
Sophomore guard Xaivian Lee is averaging 18.1 points, five rebounds and 3.3 assists through 11 games this season. (Princeton Athletics)
Xaivian Lee is a 6-foot-3 sophomore guard at Princeton from Toronto who did his prep years at the Perkiomen School in Pennsburg, Pa. Lee recently sat down with Ivy Hoops Online for an interview at Jadwin Gym:
Penn senior guard Clark Slajchert notched 20 points on 6-for-11 shooting, including 6-for-9 from three-point range, in his team’s 78-68 win over Howard Monday night. (Photo by Erica Denhoff)
Penn rebounded from Saturday’s loss to Kentucky with one of its cleanest and most efficient performances of the season. The Quakers scored 1.2 points per possession and hit 12 three-pointers in a 78-68 win over Mid-Eastern Athletic Conference favorite Howard at the Palestra.
Penn (7-5) took a series of early punches to the mouth from the Bison. Howard started the game on a 7-0 run and then added a 15-2 flurry midway through the first half to build a 28-17 lead.
Clark Slajchert almost singlehandedly flipped the game around for the Quakers. Slajchert scored all 20 of his points in a stretch that spanned the final eight-plus minutes of the first half and first two minutes of the second half.
The senior put Penn ahead for good with 1:34 to go in the first half when he drained an open three from the right wing through heavy contact from Howard guard Isaiah Warfield during his follow-through. Slajchert finished off the four-point play at the free throw line, then added another three 29 seconds later off a slick feed from freshman Sam Brown.
Penn fans have plenty of happy Quakeaways to hold onto as the team heads into a long layoff for finals, starting with how …
Penn avoided a second consecutive disastrous loss thanks to some heroics from its upperclassmen Friday.
The Quakers opened the Cathedral of College Basketball Classic with a narrow 74-72 win over Lafayette after junior guard George Smith buried a go-ahead three-pointer from the right wing with 33 seconds to go on a broken play.
Smith and the rest of the Quakers (4-2) definitely owe senior guard Clark Slajchert a big thank you. Slajchert set Smith up for the game-winning shot after he recovered a deflection in the backcourt and found the open shooter following a mad scramble for the ball.
Slajchert finished with a team-high 18 points and tied a career high with five assists. The senior played 37 minutes, so load management for Slajchert will be something to monitor as the Red and Blue play three games in as many days this weekend.
It’s (mostly) happy Quakeaways for the day, led by how …
Mataya Gayle notched 14 points on 5-for-16 shooting for Penn in her second collegiate game Tuesday. (Penn Athletics)
Saint Joseph’s gave Penn women’s basketball a reality check Tuesday night at the Palestra. After the Quakers’ comfortable season-opening victory Saturday over Marist, the undefeated Hawks cut them down, 72-48.
The Hawks have run up 20-plus-point margins of victory in each of their first three games (including at Yale). Their top scorers from last year have returned, joined by grad student Chloe Welch and freshman Gabby Casey, two of the five Hawks who hit double figures at Penn. Sophomore forward Laura Ziegler led the way with 18 points and 14 rebounds.
How good are these Hawks offensively? Well, in the first quarter, they hit a third of their shots, including 1-for-3 from three, and the Quakers kept pace. In the second quarter, St. Joe’s hit half of its shots, including 2-for-4 from three (the killer being a buzzer-beater from just inside half-court to leave Penn seven points down). In the third quarter: 57% overall, 40% of threes. In the final quarter, 75% on all shots, including 3-for-4 on threes.
With a little ball-fake and a half jab step, Tyler Perkins generated just enough space to rise up over Villanova’s Brendan Hausen and create a memory Penn fans will remember forever.
The freshman sensation used those moves to bury a corner three in front of the Penn bench that pushed the Quakers’ lead over the Associated Press No. 21 Wildcats to 11 points with four minutes to play and sent the Palestra into a frenzy. After weathering one last barrage of Villanova three-pointers, Penn sealed a stunning 76-72 upset over the Wildcats.
For the Quakers (3-1, 1-1 Big 5), the win was their first triumph over a ranked team since a nearly identical upset over Villanova at the Palestra in December 2018; that edition of the Wildcats was defending an NCAA title and entered ranked 17th in the AP poll.
The images the upset generated — Perkins throwing the ball into the air in joy as time expired, fans storming the court — are the ones that, in a perfect world, would create a whole new generation of dedicated Quakers fans.
What else can Penn fans hold onto from a magical Monday night?
Penn is off to its first 2-0 start since the 2018-19 season after a wire-to-wire win over Bucknell at the Palestra by a score of 80-61.
The Quakers had a few nervous moments in the second half after a stagnant stretch on offense allowed the Bison (0-2) to cut what had been a 20-point halftime lead to just nine as the clock neared the under-eight media timeout.
Instead of relying on one player to stop Bucknell’s run, Penn persevered by committee. Junior guard George Smith restored Penn’s double-digit lead by making a nice interior find to sophomore forward Johnnie Walter (more on him later) for an easy layup late in the shot clock.
Sophomore guard Cam Thrower added seven critical points down the stretch as well, including a difficult stepback two-point jumper and a deep three-pointer with 4:45 that pushed Penn’s lead to 21 and effectively iced the game.
Bucknell may not have been the most difficult opponent — the Bison entered Wednesday ranked 349th in KenPom — but the win left Penn fans with plenty of happy Quakeaways:
Tyler Perkins delivered a strong 15-point performance in his collegiate debut. (Penn Athletics)
Chalk up Penn’s first game in the post-Jordan Dingle era as a success.
The Quakers raced out to a 30-9 lead in the first six-plus minutes against Division III John Jay on Monday at the Palestra and didn’t look back en route to a 102-57 win.
With the second-leading scorer in Division I gone to St. John’s, Penn (1-0) relied on offensive production by committee; five players scored in double figures.
Monday’s contest was, in all practicality, a preseason game. But the Quakers put enough on tape to have some meaningful Quakeaways ahead of Wednesday’s home game against Bucknell.
Ivy Hoops Online editor Mike Tony and IHO writer Rob Browne discuss memorable postseason runs for Princeton men’s and women’s basketball and Columbia and Harvard in the WNIT, the new “Big 5” (really City 6) Classic, the prospect and potential impact of athletic scholarships for Ivy hoopsters and much more:
Kaitlyn Chen put on a memorable performance in Princeton’s victory over archrival Penn Friday, notching 27 points, five assists and four rebounds in 37 minutes. (Photo by Erica Denhoff)
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.
