Basketball Team to Meet Penn, Tigers This Weekend

Quakers and Tigers ordinarily have very little in common. But this season's Ivy League basketball race finds the Penn Quakers sharing first place with the Princeton Tigers, and regretfully for Harvard, the two teams will have something more in common this weekend--a game with the Crimson varsity.

The contests may well be a repeat performance of last week's nightmare when the Crimson was trounced at Princeton 74-45 and then tromped on Philadelphia 78-53. The varsity plays the Quakers tomorrow night, and takes on the Tigers Saturday night. Both games are at 8 p.m. in the IAB.

Switches to Man-to-Man

Before last week's disaster, the varsity had been the best defensive team in the league, holding their opponents to an average of 58 points per game. To bolster his faltering defense, coach Floyd Wilson switched to an unprecedented man-to-man in the second half of the Penn game.

Although the Crimson had little success with the new defensive formation (only one other team scored more against the Crimson than Penn), Wilson may still resort to it in an effort to stop Princeton Saturday night.

But Penn's rude disregard of his change in strategy seems to have convinced Wilson to stick to his usual zone defense against the Quakers this Friday. The varsity has been working on the fast break at practices this week which would further indicate that the zone is in the works for Penn.

Strand Leads Scoring

The only problem Harvard faces besides its defense is mounting an effective offense. Vern Strand came through for the Crimson in last week's debacles, hitting for 20 points against Princeton and 16 against Penn. He now leads Crimson scorers with a 10.6 point average, followed by Dennis Lynch at 10.1.

Leo Scully returned to his double figure form against Princeton, sinking 11 points after having a miserable game against Penn. If all three players turn in top performances tomorrow night, the Crimson could conceivably lose to the Quakers by less than 10 points.

League-leading Penn will send four men into the game who are currently averaging in two figures, and three of the four are on the list of Ivy top ten scorers. In addition, the Quakers will have the services of J.D. Graham who has been out for two weeks with a bad ankle.