Coming into Friday night’s contest, Penn guard Miles Cartwright was fourth in the Ivy League in scoring at 14.0 points per game and was coming off a season-high 28 points against Brown.

But Harvard was able to contain the junior throughout the night, holding him to just eight points on three-of-11 shooting.

“[It’s] not that we shut Cartwright down, but we certainly made life difficult for a very good player,” Amaker said.

Amaker gave much of the credit to Saunders, who the coach has often tasked with defending the opponent’s best perimeter player this season.

“Wesley’s a hard guy for guards, especially smaller guards, to score against,” Amaker said. “He’s big, he’s strong, [and] he has the ability to stay in front of them.”

EASIER SAID THAN DONE

Friday marked the first comfortable victory in Ancient Eight play for the Crimson, which had blown large advantages or needed dramatic comebacks in its previous five conference wins.

Those victories had come by an average of 5.4 points, but Harvard never had much trouble with the Quakers.

After Penn tied the game at nine early on, the Crimson outscored the Quakers by 10 for the rest of the first half. In the second period, the advantaged ballooned to as large as 22 with 7:41 to go, and unlike in its previous games against Yale, Brown, and Cornell, the victory was never in question.

“We had been able to play hard for about 20 minutes, a half at most before it starts to fall apart,” Smith said. “We just tried to break that chain tonight.”

—Staff writer Scott A. Sherman can be reached at ssherman13@college.harvard.edu.