McGinnis | Penn basketball needs a wingman on defense

EASTON, PA. — Basketball is a team sport. But for many of Penn’s opponents, it seems as though one player has been able to dominate the game.

Tim Frazier. Antoine Mason. Seth Hinrichs. Each ripped open Penn’s defense from the wing and found ways to put up absurd scoring numbers, combining to put up 29.3 points per game on Penn when the Quakers faced Penn State, Niagara and Lafayette, respectively.

For Penn to remain competitive this season in the Ivy League, someone is going to have to step up as an effective defensive presence on the perimeter.

“We need somebody that wants to defend, that’s all they want to do.,” coach Jerome Allen said. “It’ll help the team win.”

Now, Penn’s perimeter defense has been effective at times.

Although he ended up totaling 31 points against the Quakers, Niagara star Antoine Mason managed just 1-for-8 shooting in the first half before heating up in the second stanza.

And Lafayette did only manage to shoot 4-for-13 on three-pointers in the first half.

But the issue is that the Quakers have yet to sustain this defensive intensity over the course of an entire game. It’s one thing to shut down a star player for 20 minutes as he struggles to find his groove, but an entirely different one to shut him down for 40.

Moving into Ivy play, the Red and Blue will need a stopper against elite wing scorers like Brown’s Sean McGonagill and Cornell’s Nolan Cressler.

Now the real question is, who steps up for the Quakers?

One would tend to hope that the answer for Penn already lies within the starting lineup.

One of Allen’s top options has to be Miles Cartwright, who has been a fairly effective wing defender all season. As a team leader, it would make sense for him to assume that role.

Of course, defense is never just an individual effort and the team as a whole will have to increase its focus. Many times during this weekend’s matchup against Lafayette, the Quakers found themselves out of position during transition as the Leopards stretched the floor with three-point shooters.

“[Hinrichs] came down and hit a big shot for them and I ran back to the paint instead of knowing where he was,” senior forward Fran Dougherty said. “We were trying to switch a lot, we missed a couple assignments and they made us pay.”

For this team moving forward, defense will have to be the centerpiece, both as a way to stop teams from scoring and as a means of facilitating a stronger transition offense that was missing against Lafayette.

The Leopards were an interesting matchup in the way that they forced Penn to stretch the floor, but they shouldn’t have been able to get free for those weakly contested three-pointers late in the game. Like so many teams that live and die by the deep ball, they got hot and changed the course of the game.

The zone scheme that was so effective earlier this week against Niagara appeared rather flawed at times at Lafayette, even in interior play. Though the main story was Lafayette’s outside shooting, the Leopards’ smaller guards also penetrated and found layups in matchups against Penn’s big men.

For this team to succeed, Dougherty and sophomore center Darien Nelson-Henry must improve their help defense on these inside drives, as most teams have more potent penetration than Lafayette.

Earlier this week, it seemed as though Penn had defined its defensive identity. Yet now, the perimeter defense seems like a giant question mark again.

The next test for the Quakers will be Wednesday at Villanova, their second Big 5 matchup of the season. At this point it seems rather unlikely that Penn will be able to muster enough defensive muscle to hold off a Wildcats team coming off of an upset of No. 2 Kansas.

In any case, the Quakers are desperate for a defensive leader to refocus a unit that spent too much time “out to lunch” at Lafayette, according to coach Jerome Allen.

Penn won’t win again until lunchtime is over.

HOLDEN MCGINNIS is an Engineering freshman from Philadelphia, Pa., and is a staff writer of The Daily Pennsylvanian. He can be reached at dpsports@ thedp.com.

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