M. Hoops splits first two Ivy contests

Harvard - 78 Penn - 75 Penn - 87 Dartmouth - 71

BOSTON -- For the second straight year, the Penn men's basketball team walked out of Briggs Cage with a bitter taste in its mouth.

Despite a 14-0 run by the Quakers (10-4, 1-1 Ivy League) in the second half, Harvard pushed Saturday night's game to overtime and rode the shoulders of guard Patrick Harvey to a 78-75 victory.

Harvard (10-6, 3-1) won for the fifth time in 25 tries against Penn coach Fran Dunphy, including last year's 77-62 triumph over the Quakers on the Boston side of the Charles River.

"We have 10 wins, but we certainly do not have Penn's number," Harvard coach Frank Sullivan said. "Our league is so tough right now... there's a lot of high-quality non-league wins out there, but when we get to league play, we all know each other."

Harvey stole the show for the Crimson, scoring 28 points on 9-for-15 shooting from the field, including 15 points over a 12:36 stretch of the second half when no other Harvard player scored.

The junior from Chicago also made four free throws in the last 15 seconds of overtime to seal the win for Harvard.

"I thought that Patrick Harvey was tremendous," Dunphy said. "He was tremendous. And we had a couple of opportunities... but I give Harvard a great deal of credit. They played well, they were ready to go and they played a great game."

Ugonna Onyekwe led the way for Penn with 22 points and seven rebounds. He scored four points in overtime to help keep the Quakers alive, but David Klatsky missed a three-pointer in the final seconds that would have sent the game to a second extra session.

Klatsky was 0-for-4 from downtown on the night, part of a 9-for-27 team effort by the Quakers. Junior guard Andrew Toole made three of his seven attempts from beyond the arc, but was on the bench for the final shot after fouling out with 2:16 left in overtime.

"If you're going to live by it, sometimes you're going to die by it, and we died by it tonight," Dunphy said of Penn's three-point shooting. "We go 9-for-27, which isn't horrendous, but we had a couple of open looks that we probably should have buried."

Penn's three-point shooting was much better on Friday night at Dartmouth. The Quakers scorched the nets at Leede Arena with 15 three-pointers in 26 attempts, a 58 percent clip paced by Jeff Schiffner's 6-for-7 performance.

Schiffner scored 17 of his 20 points in the first half, including five during a 16-2 run that gave Penn an 18-point lead at the end of the first half.

The Big Green (6-9, 0-4) closed the gap to nine points, but Penn used a 13-0 spurt to seal the 87-71 victory. Dartmouth has not beaten the Quakers since an overtime triumph at the Palestra in 1997.

Friday night, the Big Green took a calculated risk in leaving Penn's perimeter shooters open in order to focus on shackling Onyekwe and Koko Archibong. The duo combined for just 23 points, but the defensive strategy did not pay off for Dartmouth, as Schiffner, Toole and Klatsky had plenty of open looks at the basket.

"I was happy with the way we went about it," Dartmouth coach Dave Faucher said. "I thought that for 36 minutes, we played a good basketball game. It got away from us in a four-minute stretch where we did not play well. Those are the four minutes that I would like to have back."

Despite Penn's success on Friday, the loss on Saturday puts the Red and Blue in fifth place in the Ivy League. Princeton, Brown and Yale all swept their weekend opponents to open at 2-0, with Harvard behind in the standings by percentage points.

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