Tony | For Penn basketball's defense, bigger is better

Penn coach Jerome Allen likes to talk about defense. For him, that’s what winning basketball is all about.

And here’s what he had to say postgame after Penn held the nation’s leading scorer to 1-for-8 shooting in the first half Tuesday night.

“Guys put forth the right effort. Guys closed out. Guys showed up big.”

And he’s right – the Quakers posted one of their most convincing victories in Allen’s four-plus seasons here thanks to a defense that suddenly wouldn’t quit.

It seemed like a foregone conclusion that Niagara guard Antoine Mason would light up the Quakers. He entered the game as the nation’s leading scorer at 31.2 points per contest and had the pedigree to be just the next backcourt Quakers-killer after Penn State guard Tim Frazier torched Penn for 29 points earlier this month at the Palestra.

After all, this was a Quakers squad that ranked last among Ivies in defensive rebounding and next-to-last in scoring defense. Giving up 73 points in each of its previous four games had Penn looking in desperation mode before the Niagara showdown even started.

But then Penn got stop after stop after stop in its zone defense, absolutely shutting Mason down in the first half. Mason’s 1-for-8 field-goal shooting in the opening half allowed the Quakers to get out in transition off of missed shots and play the wide-open game they’ve been talking about wanting to play ever since they got back from Italy. Mason eventually notched 31 points, but many of them were garbage points after Niagara’s loss had already been sealed.

“I thought that Penn did a very good job with their zone. They kept us out of the paint,” Niagara coach Chris Casey said. “Normally, we try to get 40-plus paint touches per game and we were down in the high-20s tonight.”

It’s true that Niagara is only Niagara – beating the Purple Eagles by 19 at home hopefully won’t be the highlight of Penn’s season.
And yet it very well could be the turning point.

How else to describe a game in which a team aching for some defensive muscle holds the opposition to 9-for-28 shooting and nearly doubles it up in defensive rebounding in the first half? How else to describe registering nine blocks, the most in any of Allen’s 118 games as Penn coach?

And how else to describe the momentum that the Quakers now have on the all-important defensive side of the ball going forward?

“It’s everybody’s effort to box out, to get rebounds,” sophomore guard Tony Hicks said. “And it’s really big for our confidence to know that we can get stops.”

In junior forward Greg Louis’ first 2013-14 appearance after missing the first four games with a hamstring injury, he delivered six rebounds and two momentum-swinging blocks in just 15 minutes, more than enough to keep him locked in mentally on the defensive end as non-conference play progresses.

Even sophomore guard Julian Harrell got in on the action in his fourth career game, notching two blocks of his own and grabbing seven boards.

These are just a couple of the non-big name Quakers who will have to step up when sophomore center Darien Nelson-Henry and senior captain Fran Dougherty can’t get it done with swats or boards.

If defense is to be this team’s identity and the springboard to a transition offense that few Ivy teams will be able to keep up with, then the defensive chutzpah of these Quakers has to get consistent now. Niagara has no defense of its own to speak of, but the Purple Eagles had an offense that should have given Penn fits.

And because it didn’t, upcoming games like Lafayette, Wagner, Marist and Rider look that much more winnable. Now that they are in the zone both figuratively and literally, there’s no turning back. Either Penn keeps up this momentum for the rest of the calendar year or it tinkers with infinite lineup changes and multiple offensive focal points until the bottom falls out.

But what this Niagara game has showed us is that Allen’s guys can show up big when facing big targets like Mason. And the bigger they are, the more they win.

MIKE TONY is a senior English and history major from Uniontown, Pa. and Senior Sports Editor of The Daily Pennsylvanian. He can be reached at tony@thedp.com.

SEE ALSO

Penn basketball blows out Niagara, 85-66

Niagara’s Antoine Mason: The best player you’ve never heard of

Three up, three down | Penn basketball vs. Niagara

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Hawkeyes destroy Penn basketball in Iowa, 86-55

Penn men’s hoops heads to Midwest to take on undefeated Hawkeyes

Tydings | 2013-14 Penn basketball too similar to last year’s frustrating season

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