Crimson Can’t Stop Penn Bombers

PHILADELPHIA, Pa.—The first was troubling. The second was killer. Both were wide open.

Penn’s Koko Archibong hadn’t seen daylight down low in the first twenty minutes against the Crimson Saturday night, but drilled a 23-footer 20 seconds after halftime. Harvard senior Sam Winter coughed the ball up on the ensuing possession, and the Quakers swung the ball around to an unguarded Jeff Schiffner. The shot fell. Just like that, the gains of a gritty, late first-half run by the Crimson had all but vanished. A six-point deficit had ballooned back to double-digits.

A night after holding Princeton to a season-low 17.6 three-point shooting percentage at Jadwin Gym, Harvard was torched by Penn to the tune of 11-for-20 from beyond the arc. Many of the attempts were close to uncontested.

While Andrew Toole set up several shots with effective dribble penetration, spot-up guard Tim Begley was a largely stationary target all night and still found himself virtually untouched. The Penn sophomore hit all five of his attempts from downtown.

One Crimson senior summarized the situation succinctly.

“We just didn’t pay any attention to the scouting report,” point guard Elliott Prasse-Freeman said.

Harvard coach Frank Sullivan said that Harvard’s game plan had been essentially to pick its poison—invite Penn’s big man to operate in the paint rather than deal with its outside shooting.

“Even though we knew there were some tough covers at the four and five for us, our intent was to really try to get the inside game from them,” Sullivan said. “So you had to find some way to bring them inside the line either with our closeouts and our footwork, but also you kind of tempt them with the inside play. There were times when we were really playing the post players a little bit softer.”

Given the customary dominance of Penn’s ubiquitous 6’8 forwards, Ugonna Onyekwe and Koko Archibong, the strategy may have seemed mystifying. But both players’ numbers, particularly Archibong’s, have been down somewhat this year.

Meanwhile, Penn has shot over 40 percent on its three-point attempts and averaged nine treys per game. In blowing out USC in Pasadena earlier this season, the Quakers hit 15 of 20 three-point attempts.

Even though Harvard’s big men had had trouble against Princeton center Judson Wallace the night before, Sullivan was more prepared to grin and bear whatever came inside rather than cope with an onslaught from three-point range.

Regardless of the logic, Harvard didn’t execute and Penn didn’t bite. Sullivan pointed to the early second-half salvos as examples of the Crimson’s failure to react to plays they saw coming before the game even started.

“Those were really recognition plays,” Sullivan said. “We had talked to our players [at halftime] and were disappointed in the recognition of the play, and I think those plays to start the second half were again recognition issues [concerning] things we had gone through during the course of the week.

“What’s more of an issue than anything else was that we had gone through them, that these were things that they knew and had footprinted for them, and we had to react.”

In the end, Onyekwe and Archibong had quiet nights inside while Harvard scrambled to keep up with a Penn lineup rife with shooters. Archibong made more noise with his pair of second half three-pointers than he did at any point in the paint.

Harvard’s defense beyond the arc had been quite different the night before. Princeton leading scorer Spencer Gloger had a dismal outing Friday, missing all seven of his attempts from long range. Senior forward Sam Winter guarded Gloger for most of the night, and Gloger’s only easy bucket came off a late fast break.

“Anytime Spencer gets four points on 2-for-14, it goes hand-in-hand with the overall defense of the Princeton team,” Sullivan said after that game. “Clearly, a lot of attention went into him because he’s been such a leader in the scoring column, so we did a couple of things we thought were real positive for us.”

But Princeton also had easy misses. A number of Princeton threes came on open looks that could and should have fallen.

“I think he was just off tonight,” Princeton Coach John Thompson III said of Gloger. “Not that they didn’t do a good job, but I think he was off.”

Off or not, the long range shots didn’t fall for Princeton. They did for Penn. In the end, both games were still losses.

—Staff writer Martin S. Bell can be reached at msbell@fas.harvard.edu.