Fran McCaffery’s Penn team has not lost this month.
Behind a second-half surge, the Quakers extended their winning streak to four with an 82-76 victory over Cornell at the Palestra on Saturday evening.
The Quakers win is a boon to the team’s hopes of qualifying for the four-team Ivy League tournament. Penn (13-10, 6-4 Ivy) now holds sole possession of third place and the head-to-head tiebreaker over Cornell (12-11, 5-5).
TJ Power and Jay Jones led the Quakers with 17 points each. Five Quakers scored in double figures.
Jake Fiegen led Cornell with 17 points, while Philadelphia native Jacob Beccles added 10 points. The Constitution High alum is the first Public League player to play for an Ivy League school since 1980.
Career nights for newcomers
Jones and Lucas Lueth both set new career highs in scoring to help seal the win. Jones, a freshman guard, reached double-figure scoring for the first time in his Penn career. He was instrumental in the game’s closing minutes as Cornell extended the game with fouls. Jones shot 9-of-11 from the line, with seven of those makes coming in the final two minutes.
“The coaching staff has done a great job, and they give me a bunch of confidence,” Jones said. “[If] you look, you’ll see me look at the coaching staff after I shoot my first [free throw] all the time. I’ve got a lot of trust in them.”
Lueth went on a 6-0 run by himself in the second half to build the Quakers’ lead from three points to nine with 9 minutes, 35 seconds remaining.
The sophomore forward, who transferred to Penn from Kirkwood Community College in Iowa, finished with 11 points on 4-of-5 shooting.
“They’re new to our program,” McCaffery said. “They’re new to our system. But they’re both really smart. They both prioritize winning. They do the things that are necessary for the team to win.”
Penn’s bench outscored Cornell’s reserves, 30-16. Jones and Lueth combined for 19 points in the second half as the Quakers pulled away.
“They earned the opportunity to play at crunch time tonight in a very meaningful game,” McCaffery said. ”So, as a coach, you’re proud of that character.”
Defense clamps down
Penn had a poor shooting night, hitting 42.6% of its shots from the field and shooting 3-of-20 from three-point range. But the Quakers were able to lean on their defense to contain Cornell. Penn held Cornell to its third-lowest point total of the season. The Big Red shot 47.6% from the field against Penn’s defense and were 6-of-23 from distance.
Cornell also struggled from the free throw line, making 10-of-21 shots. Penn converted 16 Cornell turnovers into 23 points while allowing nine giveaways of its own.
“All throughout practice we were talking about heating them up,” Lueth said. “So that’s what we did.”
Method to the Ivy madness
After a 76-67 win over Columbia at the Palestra on Friday, the Quakers picked up two Ivy victories in as many days. Penn gained some distance on the rest of the pack in its bid for a league tournament berth. Dartmouth and Princeton, who are tied for fifth place in the Ivy standings, both lost on Saturday. Their losses give Penn a two-game cushion over the Ivy tournament cut line.
The Quakers are one game behind Harvard for second and two games behind first-place Yale. Penn will travel to face the Bulldogs for its next game on Saturday (2 p.m., ESPN+).
“We stay pretty consistent in our approach,” McCaffery said. “We don’t look at, ‘OK, we have to win two this weekend.’ We focus on the next game. We did some things well when we played Yale, some things we didn’t do well. So you work on that, you try to get better, and you prepare to win that game.”
After Yale, Penn’s remaining schedule will include games against Dartmouth and Harvard at the Palestra and a season finale contest at Brown. The Ivy League tournament will begin March 14 at Cornell.
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