Hoops notes

The Ivy League is 6-7 so far, with three of the losses coming to Duke (Columbia), Michigan State (Brown) and Syracuse (Penn).

Defending Ivy Rookie of the Year Adam Gore had 20 points in a win over Northwestern, but strained his knee in the closing seconds of the game. Not to worry Big Red fans, at least if your SID is doing his job. Gore is listed as a probable starter in tonight's home opener against Stony Brook.

Our old friend Ryan Pettinella is off to a good start. The former Quakers forward, who transferred to Virginia via Cincinnati and community college, started at center for the Cavs. He scored four points in 13 minutes in Virginia's win over No. 10 Arizona. Luckily, he never had to take a foul shot.

We introduced the formula that we're going to be using for Ivy Player rankings in the basketball supplement. The formula, based on points, field goal and free throw attempts, rebounds, assists, steals, blocks, turnovers and fouls, comes from the book The Wages of Wins and has a natural, albeit slight bias toward forwards.

After three games, here are the rankings for the Quakers. The raw scores aren't supposed to have much meaning, but a lot about positive and negative contributions can be told from comparisons between players.

Zoller 33.5
Grandieri 18.5
Danley 18
Jaaber 14.5
Egee 5
Franklin 3
Reilly 2
Schreiber 2
Gill 1
McMahon 0
Votel -0.5
Cohen -1.5
Smith -13.5

And one final note from outside of basketball:

Can't imagine why I'd be bringing this up, but it was a big weekend for upstate New York. The 'Cuse went 3-0, Cornell beat Northwestern in hoops and archrival Harvard in hockey. The Sabres took a page from the Penn football team (sort of) and won their third straight OT game. Albany came back to beat Bucknell, and the Bills played within a point in Indy.

But my upstate neighbors also had a big weekend for the Quakers. Matt Herringon (Cambridge) won the 174-pound weightclass at the Michigan State open. Fellow 518 native Chris Ashley (Albany) had two of the biggest plays of the day for the football team. Ashley recovered Cheng Ho's fumble on a kickoff return, and later recovered Chris Wynn's muffed punt to secure possession for Penn.

Clearly they were eating their Wheaties, or more likely, their Freihofer's chocolate chip cookies. The real ones in the brown box, not the crappy ones in the white box.