M. Hoops, W. Hoops sit in Ivy League PENNthouse

M. Hoops throttled Yale and Brown PROVIDENCE, R.I. -- With 13 minutes and 28 seconds left on Saturday night and the visiting Penn men's basketball team beating up on Brown 52-28, the Brown band decided it had seen enough. Clad in hockey jerseys, the members of the band packed up their instruments and filed out of the Pizzitola Center, leaving a gaping hole in the stands behind the Bears' basket. Without musical accompaniment, Brown played like, well, a bunch of bears caught in headlights -- not that they hadn't been already. Four minutes and an 18-4 Penn run later, the Quakers led 70-32. Garbage time was in full effect, and the Red and Blue had all but put the finishing touches on the kind of Ivy League weekend where it seemed like nothing could go wrong. On Friday night, the wily Quakers (11-7, 4-0 Ivy League) actually had Yale thinking it could compete -- eight minutes into the game, the Elis (4-2, 6-13) trailed by just one point. Penn turned it up, though, leading by as many as 32 before Yale fought back to a somewhat less embarrassing 61-36. Against Brown, Penn did one better -- the Quakers spotted the Bears a 10-3 lead, giving the hometown fans something to be excited about. But undersized Brown (3-3, 6-12) was simply overmatched, and Penn cruised to an 83-48 win. "We talked about this weekend being a statement weekend for us," said Penn's Matt Langel, who hit a career-high eight three-pointers against Brown and might have challenged Matt Maloney's school record of 10 had he not spent the last 10 minutes resting on the bench. "We'd been starting to turn the corner a little bit, and starting to play well, but we wanted to go out and prove to the rest of the league what we can do out there, and I think we did that fairly well tonight." It was the kind of weekend where errant passes bounced back into Penn hands and even the most unlikely of shots seemed to find the bottom of the net. The Quakers outshot, outpassed, outhustled, outrebounded and simply outplayed the opposition. It was the kind of weekend where Brown was bad (36 percent from the floor) and Yale was worse (a paltry 23.7 percent). It was the kind of weekend where Geoff Owens, a 44.1 percent free-throw shooter coming in, hit 6-of-6 from the line. "We haven't had a good Saturday night win dating back to last year -- they've been a little too close for comfort in the past," Owens said. "So it was good to get two nice games in a row." Nice doesn't begin to describe it. The last time Penn had an Ivy weekend in which it summarily dismantled both opponents without stumbling, Maloney and Jerome Allen were patrolling the backcourt for the Quakers. Penn's combined 60-point margin of victory was the highest since the Quakers knocked off Columbia and Cornell by 81 on the road in February of 1995. Against Yale, forward Oggie Kapetanovic had his best game as a Quaker, hitting 6-of-9 from the floor to score 12 points while grabbing an efficient nine rebounds in 19 minutes. The prettiest Penn sequence of the night, though, came with just under four minutes left in the first half. Point guard David Klatsky moved the ball down low to fellow freshman Koko Archibong who spun and saw Owens lunging into the paint at the top of the key. Owens took the feed from Archibong and skied over the crowded paint for a two-handed jam to make it 24-9. Against Brown the next night, everyone got in on the action -- all 13 players on Penn's active roster scored at least one point. On paper, it looked like the Bears would be outmuscled inside; Brown's biggest starter is 6'6" freshman center Alai Nuualiitia. Penn's inside game was quiet, though, as Michael Jordan's savvy play at the point -- he had four assists and no turnovers in the first half -- and Langel's torrid shooting led the way early. Brown, playing a zone defense, seemed lost as to how to stop Penn. With 3:49 left in the first half, Langel drained a three over backup Bears center James Augustine. On Penn's next trip down the court, a confused Augustine moved from the perimeter to the basket, where he failed to stop Kapetanovic from flipping in a right-handed hook shot to give Penn a 13-point lead. In his attempts to stop the Quakers in the first half, frustrated first-year coach Glen Miller helplessly threw everything but the kitchen sink onto the court, playing all 14 Bears before the break. "Their talent overwhelmed us," Miller said. "They're the best team we've played this year, easily -- talent-wise and execution-wise?. They're stronger than us at every position." With the Bears flailing helplessly on the court, the remaining Brown fans turned their efforts from watching the game to other endeavors. Some of Earl Hunt's freshman hallmates changed their "G-O E-A-R-L" letters to read "O-G-R-E" whenever one of Penn's big men got the ball. The home crowd also found a favorite target in Brown transfer Kapetanovic, yelling out things like "There's a freakin' Benedict Arnold at the line!" and "You just couldn't cut it here!" when he shot free throws. Kapetanovic was unfazed though, hitting 3-of-3 from the line and scoring nine points in 14 minutes off the bench. Fifteen minutes after the Quakers had taken advantage of the Pizzitola Center Early Bird Special (the game ended before 8 p.m.), not so much as a first-half score had filtered in from the Yale-Princeton game underway in New Haven. No one could have known that the Elis would hold off the Tigers for a 44-42 win, leaving the Quakers in sole possession of first in the Ivy League. But that didn't stop Brown's Nuualiitia -- whose team had lost to Princeton by 16 the night before -- from speculating as to which team would rule the Ancient Eight this season. "Penn's a lot better, a lot better than Princeton."