Jay Wright is starting to like this Palestra joint.
"I always take the guys for a tour," said the Villanova coach. "They said, 'Coach, we did this last year.' I said, 'We're gonna do it anyway because I like it.'"
You might, too, after six straight triumphs over the custodians of College Basketball's Cathedral.
With a 69-47 victory last night, the No. 17 Wildcats stayed perfect in the young season, never trailing the Quakers in a predictably low-scoring Big 5 scuffle.
"They play tough, man," Wright said of the host squad. "The games are killers in here."
Of course, the visitors, as expected, dispensed most of the pain. Senior Dante Cunningham led the charge in all facets, parlaying consistently deep post position on offense into a game-high 20 points, while tallying 11 boards and three blocks at the other end.
"It's me understanding where shots are coming from," Cunningham said of his rebounding prowess.
"You need a low post presence," Wright said, "and Dante's really responded."
The overall rebounding discrepancy was especially stark: 47-24 in favor of Villanova. In a particularly rare twist of statistics, the Wildcats' recorded more offensive rebounds (19) than the Quakers (1-5) did defensive rebounds (18).
"They're just a little bit better, little bit stronger, little bit quicker," Penn coach Glen Miller said. "They beat us up on the glass, to say the least."
Miller pointed to one culprit in particular: his offense.
"When we shoot 35 percent for the game," he reasoned, "there's gonna be a lot more opportunities for them to rebound the ball."
Freshman floor general Zack Rosen was scoreless in his 21 minutes of play and managed just two assists against three turnovers.
On top of that, the Wildcats (7-0) took the Red and Blue's leading scorer, Tyler Bernardini, out of his rhythm early, holding him to just one first-half field goal. He finished with 12 points on 4-of-11 shooting, a far cry from the 26 he dropped on Penn's last ranked opponent, No. 1 North Carolina, in the season-opener.
Wright cited sophomore Corey Stokes'Proxy-Connection: keep-alive Cache-Control: max-age=0
efense as the foremost factor in limiting Bernardini. Morever, the team's ball pressure, he said, prevented the Red and Blue from getting their star the ball cleanly off of screens.
Without a properly functioning go-to man, the Quakers turned to their bench to assume the scoring load. Sophomore Harrison Gaines responded, leading the Quakers with 14 points. In a stellar first half, he poured in 12 points, including two three-pointers and a couple of impressive finishes in the lane.
"Harrison knows how to score with the ball," Miller said. "He doesn't yet know how to score without the ball."
Indeed, Miller knows that the learning curve is still steep for Gaines and the rest of his young squad.
Wright, meanwhile, is just happy to soak in the freshly-minted Big 5 memory.
"Of all the 'Let's go' [chants], the 'Let's go Quakers' always sounds the best to me," he said. "I love that chant."
Quieting them, of course, feels pretty good, too.
