Basketball is a simple game. The goal is to score more than the opponent, and that is accomplished by making shots.
Penn has learned that the hard way over the past six games.
During a five game losing streak, coach Fran Dunphy said the Quakers had been "playing relatively well," and attributes the losses to not making shots.
In an 89-62 win at Siena, on the other hand, Penn was on fire from the outside, scoring a season-high point total and looking like a far different team from the poor shooting squad that had showed up the previous five games.
"We haven't made any shots," Dunphy said. "And against Siena we made shots so it's a great equalizer when you can put the ball in the basket. Obviously we did that in Siena and hopefully we can do that again in Lafayette."
The Quakers (5-7, 0-0 Ivy) will need that hot shooting if they want to come away with a victory and start a kind of streak unfamiliar to this year's team -- a road winning streak.
Penn has struggled mightily on the road this year. Their first road win came Sunday against Siena. And even the short distance between Penn and Lafayette (5-10, 1-2 Patriot) will pose a significant challenge.
"Lafayette's a great team," Dunphy said. "They're getting some great play out of some young players. It's not an easy place to play. They're extremely well-coached and I'm sure they're gonna be more than ready to play us."
Lafayette comes in with an unimpressive 5-10 record and, significantly for the Quakers, they've played three of their games against Ivy League opponents.
The Leopards lost to Princeton by two early in the season, to Cornell by three in December and beat Columbia by three at the beginning of January.
In other words, how Penn fares against Lafayette will probably be a decent indicator of how they're going to look in the Ivy League this season.
The similarities between the Leopards and Ivy League teams do not stop at their schedule.
"It might be the most difficult place in the country to recruit to," Dunphy said of Lafayette. "With their academic standards and no scholarships and everyone else in the league has scholarships."
Although Lafayette, a member of the Patriot League, is allowed to offer scholarships, it has persisted with the league's old tradition of not using them for athletic recruiting.
"It's a great tribute to Coach [Fran] O'Hanlon and what he does and the kind of kids he gets," Dunphy added.
Lafayette's coach, O'Hanlon, is someone who Dunphy is very familiar with and who is very familiar with Penn's program. He served as an assistant under Dunphy from 1989-1995.
In the ten years since, O'Hanlon has ran his non-scholarship program in a manner that makes his former teacher proud. He has a 146-127 record at Lafayette, has won three Patriot League titles, and guided the Leopards to two NCAA tournament berths.
In this year's battle of mentor against protege, O'Hanlon's team features a dangerous lineup led by 6-foot-8, 275-pound center Sean Knitter, who leads the team with 11 points per game.
But recently, it's been the play of freshman Bilal Abdullah, a 6-5 guard from Anchorage, Alaska, that has been turning heads for Lafayette. Abdullah has been named the Patriot League Rookie of the Week, three times, most recently on Jan. 8 after a 15-point performance against Navy. He is second on the team in scoring with 9.8 ppg and leads the team with 39 assists and 20 steals.
The Lafayette lineup also includes 6-4 sophomore guard Jamaal Hilliard, who played at the Peddie School in New Jersey with Penn sophomore guard Ibby Jaaber.
The Leopards are coming off a heartbreaking last-second loss to league rival American and the Penn game will be their last non-conference game of the season.
For the Quakers, the game is their second-to-last game before they begin Ivy League play.
"I think if we can put a little win streak together and get some guys some confidence going into the Ivies, I think it'll help us a lot," Penn guard Tim Begley said.
But in the end, Begley said, it's very simple.
"If we make some shots, we'll be in pretty good shape."
