Hutz | Miller makes empty excuses

Senior leadership. Or the lack thereof. That's what all of the Penn men's basketball team's problems have boiled down to. At least that's the line coach Glen Miller continues to offer as an excuse after the Quakers dropped two games to Dartmouth and Harvard at the Palestra this weekend.

Will the line always be that if there are no upper-class leaders the team won't be "good" in a particular year? Do we automatically have to look towards next season then?

It seems to be a changing philosophy of the Penn program led by Miller, one that's shifting towards putting too much weight on a single factor.

"That's why teams win," Miller said after Saturday's 66-60 loss to Harvard. "They win because they have a couple of guys like that that are solid as a rock and we're not there yet. I'm just telling you the reality of the matter."

Sure, a dominating senior would be good for the team. I'll admit that I've fallen into the trap before this season of pointing solely to Penn's lack of an experienced playmaker, but really, we have to move beyond that now.

The coaches can't just put up their hands in frustration ("I don't know what else you can do as a coach and I think quite frankly, I don't know what else you can do as a player," Miller said after his team had a number of good looks that wouldn't fall this weekend).

There are other ways to win.

Look at Cornell. When the Big Red won the Ancient Eight title last year, Louis Dale and Ryan Wittman were both sophomores and key contributors. Then-junior Jeff Foote stepped in without playing competitively for over two years.

Although senior guard Drew Housman played hard for the Crimson throughout the entire game Saturday night and junior Jeremy Lin came through at the end, coach Tommy Amaker repeatedly called the victory a team effort.

For the Crimson, who lost a close 58-55 contest the night before at Princeton, the win was a product of work ethic rather than throwing in the towel and saying they don't have the pieces this year to contend for the title. I'll grant that maybe its easier for Harvard to talk about the bounces finally going its way after a win, but I think there's still a noteworthy discrepancy between the attitudes of Amaker and Miller.

This wasn't the first time I heard Miller reflect back on the days of Ibby Jaaber and Mark Zoller. He blamed the loss on a few missed opportunities that would have been avoided with the right players.

"They would be the separators," Miller said after the Harvard contest. "We would be winning this game by double figures."

When Miller asked for some "magic dust" to solve the Quakers' woes in that same press conference, it told me that the white flag is up. But that shouldn't be the case this year.

So in these last few games Miller and his assistants should concentrate on finding the core group of guys that can work together and feed off each other to win, so the same scenario won't play out next year.

Krista Hutz is a senior History major from Philadelphia and is former Sports Editor of The Daily Pennsylvania. Her e-mail address is hutz@dailypennsylvanian.com.

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