Quaker Offense Stifles M. Hoops

On Feb. 6, the Harvard men’s basketball team played Penn at The Palestra and got blown off the court, falling behind immediately and trailing by double digits for the final 32:39 of the game—including a 31-point halftime deficit—en route to a 104-69 loss.

Saturday night at Lavietes Pavilion in the Crimson’s season finale, Harvard kept the rematch close through halftime but ultimately couldn’t contain the explosive Quaker offensive as Penn ran away with a 77-56 win.

The Crimson finishes the season with a 4-23 record, including a 3-11 Ivy League mark.

The Quakers (17-9, 10-3 Ivy) shot 17-27 (63.0 percent) in the second half, scoring nine fast-break points while holding Harvard to none.

“We moved the ball a little bit,” said Penn coach Fran Dunphy. “We got some easy opportunities and the other thing is that I think we have some pretty good shooters, so when they get open looks, hopefully they’re going to knock them down and I think we did a pretty good job of that tonight.”

“I didn’t think we had the energy in the second half that we had in the first half,” said Harvard coach Frank Sullivan. “I think, to start the second half, we just weren’t in rhythm offensively and Penn picked it up a notch.”

Penn first-team All-Ivy guard Jeff Schiffner rebounded from a 1-8 first-half performance—including 1-5 from three-point range—with a perfect second half, hitting all four of his shots from the floor—two from behind the arc—and making both of his free throws to finish with 15 points.

The Quakers, who were playing to preserve any chance of an Ivy crown, had 9-1 and 10-0 runs—with the last six points of the second spurt coming on threes by Tim Begley—in the first nine minutes after halftime as they pulled away from the Crimson.

“I think the Penn game plan was to try to get us in rotation schemes—which they did at Philly—and I think at halftime, they realized, ‘Well, we can run these ball screens and they’re not going to rotate and we can’t get the extra pass in,’” Sullivan said. “They just tried to beat us hard off the dribble and find the extra pass that way.”

“They shoot lights out. Schiffner and Begley are just unbelievable,” said junior shooting guard Kevin Rogus. “They just can’t miss. They got it inside at will, inside out and we just couldn’t keep up. After they kept hitting it, they just kept creeping away.”

Penn entered the night trailing Princeton by two games with each team playing its penultimate game of the campaign before meeting tomorrow in the season finale, meaning the Quakers needed the Tigers to lose at Dartmouth to make tomorrow’s game meaningful.

At halftime, the Lavietes public address announcer told the crowd that Princeton led 32-14 at halftime of its game, but the Big Green ended up making it a contest before falling 64-59, giving the Tigers the Ivy title.

Harvard kept the game close early in the first half, leaving those in attendance to wonder just how long the Crimson could hold the seemingly inevitable Penn explosion at bay.

When junior captain and small forward Jason Norman missed a two-handed dunk nine minutes before halftime and the Quakers took advantage of the momentum swing to reel off an 8-1 mini-spurt to take a 25-18 lead, it appeared the dam might have burst.

But Harvard came back to tie the score at 26 with layups from Norman, sophomore power forward Matt Stehle and junior center Graham Beatty, along with a jumper by junior guard Jim Goffredo.

Rogus and Goffredo led the Crimson with 13 points apiece, while Beatty added eight points and eight rebounds, five off the offensive glass.

Rogus also set the school record for three-pointers in a season with 74.

“He needs no room and no time [to get his shot off], so that’s a tough combination,” Dunphy said.

Two other Harvard players had a chance to reach season benchmarks. Stehle needed 12 rebounds to give him 200 for the campaign, but didn’t pull down any in the first half while playing only nine minutes due to foul trouble and finished with just a pair.

Meanwhile, Norman needed 23 points to average 10 per game for the season but scored just a single bucket in each half, although he did dish out six assists, tying a career high.

Begley paced Penn with a game-high 17 points, hitting five of his nine three-point attempts, and forward Adam Chubb chipped in 10 points and 10 rebounds, but committed six turnovers.

Guard Ibrahim Jaaber added 11 points on 4-5 shooting off the bench for the Quakers.

The loss was Harvard coach Frank Sullivan’s 200th with the Crimson. A win would have been his 142nd at Harvard, tying Floyd Wilson for the school record. The defeat also postpones the Crimson’s quest for its 150th win at Lavietes Pavilion to next season.

Harvard is tentatively scheduled to open the 2004-2005 campaign Nov. 19 at Notre Dame and play its first game at Lavietes four days later against Holy Cross.

The Crimson—which entered the weekend leading the Ivy League in free-throw shooting at 72.5 percent but was hurt by a 13-24 performance Friday night against Princeton—hit just nine of its 19 attempts from the charity stripe.

Harvard finishes the season 0-9 against teams that reached the postseason in 2003.

—Staff writer Alan G. Ginsberg can be reached at aginsber@fas.harvard.edu.