Call them the Cardiac Quakers.
The Penn men’s basketball team, with a penchant for keeping games close all season, won 60-58 on a jumper from junior guard Zack Rosen with 2.3 seconds left after blowing a 17-point first half lead at Yale.
“Coach [Jerome Allen] obviously said to make a play,” said Rosen, who finished with eight points, seven assists and six rebounds. “I just tried to go out there and read what was out there.”
“At that moment in the game, there’s nothing really any coach can do except sit down in the chair and just watch,” Allen said. “I thought it was a tough shot, I thought it was good defense.”
A desperate shot by Yale’s Austin Morgan at the end of regulation was right on target but missed off the front rim.
Rosen almost threw the game away — literally — on a turnover with the previous possession, but found redemption on the final shot.
“[The shot] felt good because I almost cost us the game the possession before with a pass to the Yale band,” Rosen said.
The win capped a successful weekend for the Quakers (11-12, 5-4 Ivy), who returned home with a pair of road wins at Brown and Yale.
Rosen’s shot came after two offensive rebounds by Yale (12-12, 5-5) and a block by Mike Howlett, who got his first start of the season on Saturday after an impressive showing at Brown on Friday.
“Unbelievable,” Rosen said of Howlett’s performance.
“We don’t even get to Zack making the shot if Mike Howlett doesn’t come up with the block,” Allen said. “His overall contribution, the way he rebounded the ball, the way he defended [Greg] Mangano, what he gave us on the offensive end, I just thought that it was huge.”
Howlett had 11 points, three rebounds and three blocks on the night — none bigger than his last — and battled in the paint with Ivy Player of the Year candidate Mangano. The Yale forward put up 26 points and 11 rebounds.
Lost in the excitement of the final sequence was senior guard Tyler Bernardini’s 1,000th point for the Red and Blue, which came on a three-pointer 4:51 into the first half.
He led Penn in scoring on both nights this weekend, netting 16 points to follow up his 26-point performance at Brown. Two of Bernardini’s 16 points came on an emphatic one-handed jam on a fast break feed from junior guard Rob Belcore.
But the weekend was almost just as easily marred by poor second-half defense.
In a troubling trend, Penn saw a big early lead evaporate and found itself behind in the second half for the second straight game. Yale used a 14-4 run early in the second half to pull ahead before the Quakers recovered.
“I think we let our guard down a little bit defensively toward the end of the first half and then into the second half,” Rosen said. “That’s something that we’ve been trying to concentrate on all year and we’re going to get back to work this week and try to put 40 minutes of defense together.”
While the Quakers held Yale to 36-percent shooting from the floor in the first half, the Bulldogs broke free in the second on 52-percent shooting.
The pair of wins was a welcome change for the Red and Blue after a momentum-halting four-game losing streak, which included three overtime defeats.
“We got hit in the mouth a little bit over that stretch, and so we kind of had to stumble back a little bit and we had to regroup ourselves,” Bernardini said. “So I think this week was just us getting back to who we are and who we want to be.”
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