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.
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