Penn vs. Delaware 2nd half Game Notes

 

After dividing my time between watching the second half of last night's Penn-Delaware game and the Knicks-Thunder game, I wanted to follow up on Noah's post with some other game notes.

First off, since I only watched the second half, I did not witness Penn's poor shooting – 10-for-29 from the field — in the opening stanza. However, I did get to see Zack Rosen put the team on his back during what turned out to be an amazing second half for the junior point guard. Rosen scored 26 of Penn's 52 points after halftime and showed off his whole offensive repertoire — step-backs, three-pointers and a number of double-clutched layups.

Some things I noticed:

1) Rosen's confidence.

Just wow. After shooting 1-for-7 in the first half, Rosen apparently just flipped a switch and turned it up offensively in the second period without regard to his poor shooting in the opening frame. He hit 7-for-11 from the field after halftime, but more importantly, he shot 9-for-12 from the charity stripe (11-for-15 on the game — could have eclipsed his career-high if he were even better from the line, but that's just nitpicking).

To anyone who was watching the first half: Did Rosen show this same aggressiveness in the first half and the shots were just not falling, or did it seem like he made a conscious effort to take it to the cup? Because from what I saw, it looked like Rosen and the Penn coaching staff quickly determined that, um... NOBODY on Delaware could stop him.

Anyway, I remember watching one sequence when he was around the corner three-point line and all he did was give a jab step to his left and dribbled hard baseline (leaving his defender in the dust) until he was at the rim —  I believe he drew a foul there, maybe even an And1. He also was able to take his man off the dribble at the top of the key with one of his go-to moves, a spin move, followed by another spin move if necessary, and he seemed like he could get to the rim anytime he wanted. What's interesting to note is that Rosen actually seems to slow up once he gets to the rim (usually by contorting his body or doing a double-clutch) which isn't always great because his shots often get blocked, but it certainly can be effective: it can allow the defenders to catch up and inevitably foul him. But whatever he did, it worked, and Penn seemed content to ride it out to a victory.

2) Eggleston's intangibles

I know some commenters have talked about this in the past, but you really can't say it enough, particularly in light of Eggleston joining Penn's exclusive 1,000 points club. Eggleston was certainly not the story of the game (leave that to the duo of Rosen and Cartwright), but he put in a workman-like eight points and 10 boards. When I looked at the boxscore and saw that Eggleston yet again played all 40 minutes (the only Penn player to do so last night) it made me wonder — Who else could play his position? Schreiber, Howlett, and Turley are all centers to me, which means that Penn really doesn't have any depth at the power forward position. What makes Eggleston a "4" in my mind is just his combination of size and scoring ability. The other bigs I mentioned can score at times (Turley had 14 last night) but they really aren't dynamic enough offensively to take their man off the dribble, and they aren't quick enough defensively to stay in front of most 3s or 4s. With that said, it makes sense that Jack plays as much as he does, but I don't think it can be stressed enough how much he means to the this team, and how much his loss next year will be felt.

3) Penn three-point defense: out-of-sync

With a nice win like that, Penn should be pretty happy heading into the holiday, but good teams must learn to correct mistakes even after wins. Noah mentioned the six total team assists: part of that can be contributed to Rosen's mano-a-mano takeover, but still, that number has to be at least in the double-digits right? Also, the three-point defense, and defense in general, was a little sloppy at times and I'm sure Coach Allen will address that. Although Delaware shot 0-for-3 from deep in the first half, that quickly changed after halftime. They hoisted up 16 in the second period, and buried 7 of them. Were it not for Blue Hens' guard Jawan Carter nailing five on his own, Penn could have taken this game much earlier. But the reason they didn't was because of a few lapses defensively on rotations. In fact, many of the Blue Hens' second-half threes were uncontested. I witnessed one when Delaware just pushed the ball on a fastbreak and found an open teammate for a corner three, another that just came about given that Penn was in a zone, and finally another that Delaware nailed after Penn "showed" hard on its pick-and-roll defense, meaning that the big man, (I believe it was Howlett) edged out to cut off the opponent guard before sliding back to pick up his man who was rolling to the basket. I can't remember at this point whether it was the Delaware player who rolled out to the three point line or another player who just filled the space, but Penn was out of position to defend the three point arc on a number of plays.

With that said, Penn did take excellent care of the ball and if they can duplicate that going forward and tighten up the defense (to be sure, the effort and intensity always seems to be there this year), this team should be a force to be reckoned with in the Ivy League.

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