After leading his Pistons summer team in assists and steals over its first two games, Ibrahim Jaaber broke out in the points category.
Jaaber poured in 13 in 23:22 in Detroit's loss to the Denver Nuggets last night. He hit 4-of-9 from the floor and once again bested the field with four assists.
Ex-Villanova forward Curtis Sumpter, 23 going on 33, was on the opposing squad yet again, this time with the Denver Nuggets. He's quietly had a very good couple of outings, scoring 10, 12, 16 and 10 in four games off the bench despite some foul problems.
The Pistons wrap up their slate in Vegas on Saturday at 6:30 against the Los Angeles Lakers.
Zack Rosen, a heralded point guard from the New York area, has committed to play for Penn.
Rosen averaged 10 points and six assists a game for his high school team, Gray Bees, which hovered around the top of USA Today's poll. This coming year, he'll play at St. Benedict's Prep.
In one report, Rosen says he got offers from Iowa State, Rutgers and George Washington, but turned them down for Penn.
"They recruited me the hardest. I was their No. 1 priority and they made that clear," Rosen told Adam Zagoria of the Herald News. "I'm going to go in there and play right away and have the ball."
This will go a little way to ease the sting of last year's near-miss, Josh Owens, who ended up at Stanford.
In Quakers news today, Ibrahim Jaaber talks about his future, Rob Powelson explains why he left the men's golf program and Mark Riley earns a stunning vote of confidence from his new boss at Kalamazoo (Quote: He was in our "top four"!).
Elsewhere, coaches Jay Wright (Villanova), Fran Dunphy (Temple), James Jones (Yale) and Fran O'Hanlon (Lafayette) try to piece together a roster for the Pan-Am games in July, with local flavor Scottie Reynolds and Ahmad Nivins in the mix. Here's hoping the weather doesn't inspire any more ill-conceived comparisons from staffers while Wright and Co. are in Rio.
Phil Martelli, one of many sages of Philadelphia hoops, was a bit off on his projection that Rutgers and Boston University would be in the Palestra's Thanksgiving-weekend tournament this year.
Loyola (Md.), Virginia, Howard and Drexel were known to be in, and the Philadelphia Daily News confirmed today that the other teams involved in the "Philly Classic" (not impressed by the name) are Navy, Robert Morris and Seton Hall, plus the Quakers of course.
Looks like Penn is guaranteed games against Loyola, UVa., Howard, and either Seton Hall or Navy.
The DN points out some of the local connections that will pop up in this tournament: Billy Lange, Gil Jackson, Mike Rice, and Sean Singletary. Here are a few others:
1) Jeron Smith: A senior at Howard, Smith in 2004 wanted to transfer from UCLA to Penn, thinking he would have better luck making a roster under Fran Dunphy than Ben Howland. It didn't work out, but it looks like the contacts he made came in handy when ex-Quakers assistant Gil Jackson took over the Bison. Smith has started 18 games in two years at Howard and barely cracked 50% from the free-throw line, meaning he's given person to watch No. 2 a run for his money in that category.
2) Ryan Pettinella: It took three transfers, but Pettinella has found a niche in Charlottesville. All kidding about free throws aside, Penn could have used him the past two seasons to complement Stephen Danley down low. Luckily for the local media, Pettinella stuck around D-I basketball just long enough to get a matchup with his former team.
3) Dave Leitao: Virginia's coach, Lietao was an assistant with Glen Miller under UConn's Jim Calhoun from 1986-93, when Miller left to coach Connecticut College.
4) Steve Seymour: Seymour worked at Drexel for over a decade, two as head coach, and now is an assistant to Leitao.
Edit, 8:15 p.m.: Ibrahim Jaaber didn't play in Las Vegas tonight. His Pistons summer league team beat Washington, 84-70. I hope he isn't injured.
While you may have watched the American League notch its 10th straight win, there was other All-Star action right in town tonight. I was at the Rbk-U All-Star game, which brought to a close the five-day camp that drew over 100 of the nation's top high school hoops players. Held at Philadelphia University, this was the inaugural year for the camp, the reincarnation of Sonny Vaccaro's ABCD camp after he pulled out earlier this year.
I got a look at someone who will most likely match up against the Quakers in years to come. Maalik Wayns, who made a verbal commitment to attend Villanova last month, started at point guard for the "Finish" All-Star group. Wayns, a junior at Roman Catholic HS, was one of the four Philadelphians to participate in the camp. Granted, it was the all-star game, but it looked like the 5'9 guard was having an off night. I watched as a pair of three-pointers clunked off the rim on the way to a one-for-seven performance in almost ten minutes of play. He also had one steal and one turnover. (Edit: Apparently I missed the show earlier this week; I found out via an Inquirer article this morning that Wayns played the all-star game with a groin injury) However, in a game earlier in the week, Wayns did put up 10 points and dish out 5 assists.
In the camp championship game earlier in the evening, another local player was on the court. Andrew Randell of Communications Tech had two points on one-for-six shooting and six rebounds. Randell's "Shaun Livingston" team would hit the century mark in an easy 100-81 victory over the "Marvin Williams" squad to take the championship.
There was a lot of talent out there (it was a like a mini-slam dunk contest) and with representatives from Villanova, Ohio State, Virginia, La Salle and Duke and others in attendance, one has to wonder where these high schoolers will end up.
I don't know how much I trust the box score from yesterday's Pistons-Grizzlies summer league game, since it has Rudy Gay and Arron Afflalo combining for 97 minutes in a 40-minute contest, but Ibrahim Jaaber appeared to have another good night off the bench. He played 13:48 minutes, tops among Detroit's non-starters, and especially good considering the Pistons don't look to be rotating very much at all (for comparison, check out how many minutes the Mavericks' reserves picked up today). He shot 2-for-4 for four points, had a pair each assists and rebounds and a game-high three steals. However, he did commit three fouls and turned the ball over twice.
Next up for Jaaber and the Pistons: the Washington Wizards, tomorrow night at 6, on NBA TV.
For Brian Cusworth, the former Harvard center, it's been a mixed bag so far with the Golden State Warriors. Cusworth didn't play in the Warriors' first game, then had a good-news-bad-news performance (6 points in 10:48; four fouls) as Golden State beat Philadelphia. (I don't blame my Sixers, though; it's tough when your newest franchise player probably still has a 10 o'clock curfew.)
Cusworth was a very good Ivy League player, and he should be able to extend his playing career somewhere. I'm not quite ready to drink Harvard's Kool-Aid about him besting fellow 7-footer Patrick O'Bryant in a battle of the bigs, but Cusworth did outplay the former Bradley star on Monday. Bryant scored four points on 2-for-6 shooting, had three fouls and failed to get to the line in just over 15 minutes against the Sixers.
Edit, 10:50 p.m.: Slightly less action for Cusworth tonight as the Warriors fall to the Spurs, 90-80. Four points on 1-2 shooting in seven and a half minutes.
Jaaber plays at 6 pm today; like all of his summer league games, this can be watched on NBA.com. Not sure how much time on the court he'll get; Detroit had 3 or 4 guys sit the whole game on Saturday, and you would think they want everyone on the roster to get a good run.
Yesterday (Sunday) morning, Ibby's Pistons scrimmaged Boston with some amusing results. The Herald's Steve Bulpett reports that the referees didn't show on time, so they had to make do without them.
The game went off without a hitch except for one incident. Celtics second-round choice Gabe Pruitt stripped Jaaber on a drive to the basket, but Ibby apparently didn't think it was a clean steal. He "argued his way into the possession", ripping the ball away from the C's Andreas Glyniadakis.
Jaaber always struck me as a mild-mannered guy, and when the DP asked him about his post-graduation plans I remember thinking his responses sounded a little uninspired, as though he was just looking forward to the real world. Now it seems like he's trying to make it wait just a little longer.
Penn has extended an offer to Garvin Hunt, who's Bahamian. According to this feature in the Freeport News, he's also got offers from Harvard and Notre Dame plus interest from the likes of Virginia Tech and Vanderbilt.
I don't know what the chances of him coming to Philadelphia are, but if he does, I'm hoping Glen Miller shares the philosophy of coaches like women's basketball's Pat Knapp. Knapp tries to get each of his players one game in her region of origin; sure would be nice to follow the Red and Blue down to the Caribbean. I hear UWI is looking for a home-and-home...
Even for Pat Knapp, who has a few recruiting success stories to his name, this one was probably a bit out of reach.
But rising senior Elena DelleDonne, considered the No. 1 basketball prospect in the nation, could still end up playing in the Big 5 next year.
I read with delight this morning that DelleDonne has Villanova in her personal Final Four, along with UConn, Tennessee, and Middle Tennessee State. The 6-foot-4 scorer, who plays for Ursuline Academy, the sister school to the all-boys middle school I attended in Delaware, also made it clear she's soured on power-conference recruiting.
That's good news for those, like me, who desperately want the girl who Sportscenter called "the next LeBron James" of the women's game to stay local for her college career.
As if you needed one more reason to head out to Villanova for a night of women's hoops.
Given her self-imposed hiatus from the game, we won't know if the Wildcats are still in the hunt for at least 60 days. But I'll be tuned in from that point forward, and hopefully for the Wildcats and the women's Big 5, the more feminine version of King James decides to bring her show to Philadelphia.
His line with a couple of minutes to play in the game:
15 minutes, 1-2 from the field, 3 points, game-high 5 assists, 2 points, 1 block, 1 steal.
He first appeared midway through the second quarter (it looked like he kept the No. 2 he had at Penn) and did a lot of his damage then, during a stretch of 7 minutes or so when he picked up 3 assists.
Not surprisingly, his quickness seems to be his greatest asset, and he's been able to get by his man and kick it to an open teammate fairly regularly.
More analysis to follow. In the meantime, once this one finishes I think
NBA.com will have it archived to view for free (login required, though).
Three main things surprised me while watching The Palestra: Cathedral of Basketball on ESPN Classic a few days ago.
The Palestra took only seven months to build in 1927 Each of the Big 5 teams agreed to play a minimum 10 games there And finally, that Penn got its act together and played three thirty-second spots advertising the school. I didn't expect much from them, but they were actually pretty sweet. The one with a voiceover from NBC reporter Andrea Mitchell was good, the one with John Legend was great and one talking about
John Heisman I thought was awesome.
If you're surprised he's gone, don't worry: you weren't the only one.
It was news even to Tukufu Zuberi, director of the Center for Africana Studies. Diverse, a minority higher-ed magazine, claims that Zuberi first learned about it when a reporter called him up to ask about it.
Informed of the news, Zuberi admitted he doesn't talk to Dyson very much. (Apparently not.) Zuberi, who was instrumental in bringing Dyson to Penn, must have felt a little silly pulling up Dyson's website to confirm for himself: "Dyson is University Professor at Georgetown University, where he teaches Theology, English and African American Studies."
The bizarre story goes on. Dyson had splattered his pending Georgetown professorship on the cover of an advance copy of his new book, Know What I Mean?: Reflection on Hip Hop. That advance copy had been out there since mid-June at least, so even when some media outlets like Diverse were in the loop, Zuberi was still totally oblivious. Even the Georgetown faculty learned about their new colleague only after the decision was made to hire him, according to one professor. (Georgetown's official release came out only a couple of days ago, although Dyson said the move had been in the works for a while.)
Diverse reports that Dyson was supposed to teach a class here in the fall, although I don't see any mention of it on the online course roster anymore. In any event, if you were holding out for another class like 2003's "Western Religious Thinkers: Tupac Shakur" to fulfill that tricky Arts and Letters credit, you may want to start looking elsewhere.
EDIT: The Daily News chimes in this morning. Add departed sociology prof Elijah Anderson to the long list of people who were caught off guard by this.
After Cheap Seats got cancelled, I never thought I'd watch ESPN Classic in the near future (tons of great Philadelphia sports moments to relive), but this Thursday at 10 p.m. it will show The Palestra: Cathedral of Basketball.
The movie, narrated by legendary Phillies announcer Harry Kalas, is a documentary about college basketball's most historic gym, interviewing writers, former players and Big 5 coaches about what it was like to play there.
Producer and director Mikaelyn Austin played on the Penn women's team in the early 2000s, going to the NCAA Tournament in 2004, where the 15-seed Quakers fell to Diana Taurasi's defending champion UConn Huskies.
Anything that spreads the love of the Palestra is great to see, though I'm not sure how many people get Classic, or ESPN U, which is also showing the movie starting the 11th at 10 p.m.
From what I've heard the mediocre lighting in the Palestra scares away bigger TV stations from showing live Penn home games, but with Virginia and UNC coming to West Philly, that could sweeten up the deal.
I was comforted last year, though, when while walking to class I saw Texas players arriving at the Palestra for a practice a day before playing Villanova, and all they all had cameras out shooting the front of the stadium. Even when empty, the Palestra has more atmosphere than any other Philadelphia gym Kevin Durant will be playing in as a pro.
It was announced today that Ibrahim Jaaber will play on the Pistons' Las Vegas summer league team, joining the likes of UCLA's Arron Afflalo and almost-lottery pick Rodney Stuckey of Eastern Washington. His first game for an NBA team will be against the Sixers on Saturday at COX Pavilion.
All of the summer league games will be available via webcast on NBA.com.
On the collegiate front, men's golf coach Rob Powelson became the second successful Steve Bilsky hire in a week to walk away from Penn. The third-year golf coach, who led Penn to an Ivy League title in his final season, left to spend more time with his family, according to the athletic department.
It'll be interesting to see how coveted the men's golf job will be. Penn returns the bulk of its team that just won the league, and whoever steps in will get star Chance Pipitone's services for three more years.
The men's golf program doesn't carry any assistants, so the next hire will come from outside of the program.
Read more about Jaaber, Powelson and departed men's tennis coach Mark Riley in next Thursday's Summer Pennsylvanian.
Calling human resources.
We have some hazy Ivy League sports transactions to sort out. Here's what we know and what we don't.
Known: Cem Dinc will be lacing up his sneakers at Harvard this fall.
Unknown: Will anyone care?
After a long illness, an unceremonious departure from Indiana, an NBA Draft fiasco, a year of JuCo ball and a fluctuating weight, the transfer from Marshalltown CC is hardly a sure bet as Tommy Amaker's first recruit. But at 6'10" his tools are no joke. Other unknowns: a) If he doesn't pan out, will Amaker lose punch with the Harvard admissions office? b) When he signed on the dotted Hahvad line, what other coaches did he disappoint?
Which brings us to the next hot news bit out of Cambridge...
Known: Women's lacrosse coach Lisa Miller out at Syracuse and in with the Crimson.
Unknown: Will she regret it in five years?
The Orange program has only known Miller. She left an assistant job at then-top-20 Brown for the joys of Upstate, then built a nonexistent program into a contender. Over ten years she has twice as many wins as losses. So I'm a bit stumped as to why a program that has gone 22-55 with eight League wins in the past five years is so attractive. Miller played Harvard three times over that span and cruised to three wins; the average margin of victory was 7+.
Bob Scalise was in a good position to pitch the job to her -- he coached the Harvard men from 1974-87, starting when he was 24. Leave that aside, though -- the man must be a darn good salesman.
Known: Florida jumps on the W. Lax bandwagon and hires Yale's Amanda O'Leary as its coach.
Unknown: Is this the start of a trend?
Lacrosse programs are becoming a hot item for ambitious athletic departments -- like South Carolina, whose team will play its first game in 2009, or Auburn, which is rumored to favor starting up one. And if you're talking about a meal ticket coach, you're talking about someone like Karin Brower, who led Penn to the Final Four this year. Her stock has never been higher.
I thought that the endowment of Brower's position earlier this year would help keep her around, but O'Leary was the only other Ivy women's lacrosse coach with an endowed job, so maybe that optimism was a bit misplaced.
Speaking of bolting the Dunning Center...
Known: Men's tennis coach Mark Riley splits for Kalamazoo and an administrative spot with the USTA.
Unknown: Will his successor lead the Quakers into the NCAAs?
After losing do-or-die matches with Brown in 2006 and Columbia this year, the next Quakers coach has room to improve, and only Mikhail Bekker will be gone from the top six.
Can't say the same for Riley, who will have a tough time setting the bar higher than 69 straight conference titles for the Hornets.
Finally, in a long tradition of picking up the slack for our news department, here are the other hot topics around campus this weekend:
On Friday, the University announced plans for a $370 million biomedical research facility slated to be done by 2010.
And on Saturday, sociology professor Elijah Anderson made the move to Yale. The University will be sad to see him go, but check back for more on that in next Thursday's SP.
Former Penn goalkeeper Danny Cepero has two men in front of him on the New York Red Bulls, but he's still finding a way to impress his coaches.
Cepero, the Red Bulls' third-string goalie on a development contract, has been leading the "Reserves" squad. Every MLS franchise has its backups in a separate league, in which Cepero's Red Bulls are near the top of the tables - tied for second place out of the 13 teams at 3-1.
In his three starts, Cepero has allowed four goals and is 2-1, and came in for 15 minutes of relief in a 2-0 win in April.
That stat line maybe doesn't sound great, but MLS is a fairly high-scoring league, and Cepero had to make the team first and then play in the games while he was finishing up at Penn.
Cepero was picked in the fourth round of the 2007 Supplemental Draft in January, and has been playing with the team ever since. Once starting goalie Ronald Waterreus got injured, Cepero was made readily available as a substitute (five designated players are allowed to be chosen during the game as one of the three substitutes) though he hasn't yet made it onto the field.
Although if you listen to L.A. Galaxy President Alexi Lalas, who says that MLS is on par with England's Premiership, (and even if you, like everyone in the world but him, don't) then Cepero is doing pretty well for himself.
The New York Times isn't in my summer reading rotation these days, especially not with Wimbledon starting and Curb reruns to be watched. But this article piqued my attention.
Stephen Danley has graced the sports section once again, with a full article now instead of an NCAA Tournament blog entry. And this time, he passed on a further analysis of Brian Grandieri's leg length for an NBA Draft preview, throwing in his two cents about top prospects he's played with.
Read carefully, NBA GMs: these are the subtleties that "simply aren't visible from the stands," Danley says.
The highlights:
Glen Davis (LSU), Acie Law (Texas A&M), Jeff Green (Georgetown) and Demetris Nichols (Syracuse) would be good guys to play with on a pickup team.
He'd be "completely fine" if his hometown Wizards took Davis with the 16th pick overall. Davis is in the second round on a lot of boards, but Danley asserts he's a "polished offensive player" with "unbelievable feet". (Had to be a leg or foot reference in there somewhere.)
He outjumped Green - twice! - on tipoffs in a summer league game. But hey, at least Green's got good versatility.
Josh McRoberts (Duke), Sean Williams (BC), Brandan Wright (UNC) and Darryl Watkins (Syracuse) will all be "out of the league in 5 years or be signed by the Knicks to franchise-debilitating contracts." Couldn't tell whether he was serious, joking, or just ragging on the Knicks.
Why? McRoberts hesitates too much when faced with an open shot, Williams can't shoot, Wright can't shoot or handle, and Watkins is an underachiever who played "lackadaisically" for the Orange.
Two days until we find out if the NBA heeds Danley's warnings.
Today former Penn tri-captain and forward Mark Zoller practiced with the Philadelphia 76ers.
It was nice to see so much publicity given to him, I saw Zoller on NBC10 as well as 6ABC, along with several articles. Villanova's Will Sheridan was also at the tryout, but the focus was squarely on the local St. Joe's Prep star.
Penn's Ivy POY Ibrahim Jaaber is also trying out for NBA squads, but (as far as I know) none of them were the Sixers. Odd for a team that so thoroughly looks at local talent.
Zoller mentioned that he was so nervous before the tryout that his legs wouldn't stop moving and he couldn't sleep the night before. The Pre-draft workout took place at the Philadelphia College of Osteopathic Medicine, including college standouts like Jared Dudley and Nick Fazekas.
It was Zoller's first NBA workout, and while there is an extremely slim chance that he ends up on an NBA team (even fran Dunphy admitted he's not playing in The League), he was thrilled to get the chance. Zoller will likely end up playing overseas, like many recent Penn players have in the recent past, like former assistants Shawn Trice and matt Langel, current assistant Perry Bromwell, Michael Jordan, Ugonna Onyekwe, Koko Archibong (a recent German league MVP), Tim Begley, I could go on for a while.
The most recent Penn players to play in the NBA were fellow guards from the early 90s Matt Maloney and Jerome Allen, as well as Ira Bowman, who has a fairly successful career for, who was it... Ah, the Sixers.
It's the offseason in all the Penn sports, so there's not much to talk about. But for a few former Ivy Leaguers, there is no offseason, football is their job.
Former Penn senior captain and offensive lineman Sean Estrada was recently signed by San Francisco, and is trying out as a center for the 49ers. He has a few people he needs to beat out, but has a legitimate chance to be the team's backup center.
Some news that's even more interesting to Ivy football fans is that Harvard's record-setting running back Clifton Dawson will get every chance to not just make the team, but have an impact for the Indianapolis Colts this season.
The Super Bowl Champs lost running back Dominic Rhodes, who shared carries with rookie sensation Joseph Addai, in the offseason. One might expect the Colts to toss the responsibilities squarely on the shoulders of the thousand-yard back, but Indianapolis likes the way the two split carries so effectively in the playoffs and wants to do it again.
What makes this desire to give someone else double-digit carries each game so odd is that the Colts have no running backs on the roster with any NFL game experience. This means that Dawson, the Ivy League's all-time leading rusher, will have to beat out DeDe Dorsey -- a primarily special teams contributor for the Colts a year ago, Kenton Keith -- a runner in the CFL (sadly he's not also Canadian, like Dawson) the past three seasons and Chris Morgan -- another undrafted free agent from Indiana (Pa.).
Dawson still is a long shot to get playing time, but he will have every chance against three other unproven guys. Dorsey is a clear favorite to be the number two guy because he's had almost a year to get to know the playbook, though the Colts could likely try to bring in a free agent if none of these players have promising minicamps.
It hasn't been a very pleasant couple of days for Chance Pipitone. Although the freshman is the first Penn golfer to qualify for the NCAA Championships since Don Norbury did it in 1960, he's well back of the leaders and out of contention. His back-to-back scores of 75 put him at 10-over par through the first two rounds, tying him for 132nd out of 156. The current leader is Bronson LaCassie of Minnesota -- his score of eight-under gives him a two-stroke over Jon Curran of Vanderbilt. Stanford has been the top team so far, with its seven-under par leading Minnesota by one.
But there are still two more rounds to be played, and Pipitone still has a shot at finishing very respectably. Of the 156 players in the field, only 28 are at even-par or better.
The Ivy League is more about participation and the educational benefits of participating in athletics ... We want the same educational benefits, but we want to compete at a higher level.
That was Northwestern athletic director Mark Murphy speaking to the New York Times after his Wildcats demolished the Penn Lady Laxers in the national semifinal game a few days ago.
Now...
I think interpretations of the comment could go in a couple directions. Either Murphy was: a) Disparaging Ivy League athletics by saying that participation -- not winning -- is all that matters in the League; b) Pointing out a legit contrast between his school and the Ivy League's committment to getting the best athletes; c) Trying to cover up the fact that Northwestern is trying (and failing) to have it both ways; d) Some combination of a), b), and c).
Leaving aside the comments' validity, I think that Murphy needs to pay a lot more attention to what he says. Public statements like that demean Ivy League athletes, no matter what his intentions are.
On whether or not he has a point, I hope to get some official reaction in the coming week, and until then I encourage your feedback and thoughts in the comments section below.
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