Game 9- Delaware: The Good, Bad & Ugly

The Quakers played probably their best game of the season last night, beating Delaware on the road and scoring a season-high 78 points. As always, the full game recap is here. I’m taking over for Cal on this one, since he was airborne for the game. My thoughts:

The good: There are too many things I could put here, but it’s best summarized by Penn’s 52-point explosion in the second stanza. Zack Rosen scored half of those with a ridiculous second-half stat line (7-for-11, 3-for-4 3pt, 9-12 FT) and tied his career high with 30 points. Honorable mentions: Miles Cartwright’s first start; Penn committing just four turnovers; Jack Eggleston scoring his 1,000th point; Mike Howlett returning; two consecutive decisive road wins.

The Bad: For all their offensive prowess, the Quakers notched just six assists in the game. It was a lot of one-man shows and not a lot of ball movement and teamwork. But it’s been a while since they could win that way, so you can’t really complain. Dishonorable mention: The referees, who called 45 fouls in the game (28 on the Blue Hens), many of which were pretty questionable. To be fair, eight of those came in the final two minutes when Penn already had a double-digit lead.

The Ugly: Tyler Bernardini’s facemask. One of the players told me afterwards that Bernardini caught a nasty elbow to the nose in practice this week. Let’s hope it’s not affecting his vision, because he can’t afford another reason to keep shooting so poorly (0-3 3pt Wednesday). Not quite as ugly: Rob Belcore sporting some sunglasses during warmups. We know he likes to roll with some funky styles (read: frohawk), but indoor shades are only for poker tables. We’ll give him be the benefit of the doubt and assume he had a good reason.