NOTEBOOK: Harvard Falls Short Despite Second Efforts

After a first half in which Penn used its stifling defense with dominating effect, Harvard’s captain emerged from the locker room determined to salvage what had become a lost weekend.

Senior forward Matt Stehle scored 22 of his career-high 28 points in the second half of Saturday night’s 81-68 loss to Penn at Lavietes Pavilion.

Harvard outscored the Quakers 50-46 in the second half after netting just 18 points in the opening frame.

Stehle had the most statistically prolific game of his career, hauling in a season-high 15 rebounds for the second straight night and dishing four assists, to go with a career-high seven steals, nearly pulling off a triple-double the hard way.

Stehle scored eight of Harvard’s first 10 points out of the break, getting the team going with a three-pointer, a steal that led to a breakaway layup, and a feed to senior center Brian Cusworth that aroused Harvard’s student section into chants of “defense.”

After Penn (14-6, 6-0) struck back to widen the gap to 24 points, Stehle poured on eight points of a 10-0 run that cut the Quaker lead to 69-58 with 3:08 remaining, scoring on a trio of interior buckets and on four shots from the charity stripe.

Ultimately, however, even Stehle’s furious attempts to carry the team back could not make up the ground that Harvard had lost in shooting 21 percent from the floor in the first half.

Harvard had two chances to cut the lead to single digits before the two-minute mark, but both times turned the ball over. The second occasion resulted in a fast break and a three-point play from guard Ibrahim Jaaber, which signaled the ebb tide of Harvard’s second-half surge.

“Unfortunately, I wish as a team we’d had that sense of urgency in the first half,” Stehle said. “Personally, I didn’t have it in the first half, and that really hurt us. We never should have played [from behind] that much to begin with.”

Perhaps still feeling the effects of Friday night’s last-second 60-59 defeat against Princeton, the Crimson missed its first nine shots and committed five turnovers before freshman point guard Drew Housman’s three-point play put the team on the board.

By that point, six and a half minutes had already elapsed, and the Quakers had built up the advantage that they would maintain for the rest of the game.

“The start of the game was just the thing that a team that had lost two games at the buzzer did not need,” Harvard coach Frank Sullivan said. “And that was inability to score. Penn’s defense was terrific. It was played at another level than what we’ve seen in recent games.”

Jaaber, who entered the weekend action fifth in the nation with 3.2 steals per game, had five steals on Friday versus Dartmouth and another six against Harvard, three of which came in the game’s critical opening segment.

Housman said of the pressure, “We should have been ready for it. We can’t let teams just jump out on us 11-0...We just get buried when teams do that”

“We were all still hung over from the last night,” he added, “just being like, ‘oh man, we should have got that one,’ when we all should have been focusing on tonight.”

AN UNLIKELY ASSASSIN

Entering Saturday night’s contest, Penn forward Mark Zoller had made just 14 three-pointers during the season in 45 attempts, at 31 percent from deep. Zoller hit his first long ball to give the Quakers a 7-0 lead and kept on firing from downtown, finishing 5-of-7 from behind the arc.

“Having those first couple threes go down felt pretty good, and then teammates were looking for me,” Zoller said. “As much of a cliche as it sounds, the hoop looked as big as the ocean for me.”

Zoller scored 17 points total on 6-of-8 shooting in the first half to lead the Quakers to an insurmountable 35-18 lead at the break. He hit consecutive threes late in the first half to open a 25-7 advantage, leading Stehle, who was late to cover his man in the defensive rotation, to express his frustration.

Zoller finished with a career-high 26 points on 9-of-14 shooting, and also led Penn with nine rebounds.

POINTS IN THE PAINT

Harvard has now lost three straight games to drop to fifth place in the Ivy League...The Quakers shot 56.4 percent from the floor in the contest, including a scalding 18-of-29 in the second half...The Crimson has now dropped the last four games to Penn at home by an average of nearly 16 points.

—Staff writer Caleb W. Peiffer can be reached at cpeiffer@fas.harvard.edu.