After two regular-season losses to Princeton, Penn gets one more shot in the Ivy tournament

PRINCETON, N.J. — As the Penn men’s basketball team prepares to face Princeton in the semifinals of the Ivy League tournament on Saturday (1:30 p.m., ESPNU), it would be nice to tell a great tale about how this is another chapter in the Ancient Eight’s most famous basketball rivalry, built on hundreds of games and dozens of years of history.

Right now, though, there isn’t time for that.

Not with this game coming a week after the Quakers blew a 17-point second-half lead over the Tigers on the same Jadwin Gym court where they now meet again.

The loss snapped a nine-game winning streak that brought Penn to within one win of a share of the Ivy League title, gave Princeton said share instead, and left the Quakers with the No. 3 seed for this weekend.

“I think that last Saturday definitely left a sour taste in our mouths,” Penn guard Jordan Dingle said. “But I think our biggest message has been to not hyper-fixate on one really bad half of basketball. We put together a really good win streak by focusing on some things that we hadn’t done earlier in the season, and then we were just reinforcing that all throughout the week in practice — just making sure we do the things that got us on the win streak in the first place.”

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Lucas Monroe concurred, saying Penn’s collapse last Saturday was more of an offensive problem than a defensive one.

“That’s not something we go into games worrying about,” he said. “We had 16 good halves of basketball leading up to that game and then one really good one [in it], and then one pretty bad one on one side of the ball. … We were up by 17, so we know we’re good enough to be up on that team by a lot, and we don’t think we’re going to blow a big lead again.”

He called doing so “not really something that we do, so it’s kind of fluky, honestly.”

But that view of things has two flaws, and Princeton played into both of them.

One is that when the Tigers took a 72-60 win out of the Palestra on Jan. 16, the Quakers shot 21-of-63 from the field (33.3%) — including 0-for-12 from three-point range (no math needed there).

The other is that the recent game at Jadwin marked the fifth time this season Penn blew a second-half lead of consequence. They rescued a visit to Lafayette in overtime, but lost to St. Joe’s, La Salle, Dartmouth and Princeton.

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Quakers coach Steve Donahue would unsurprisingly rather dismiss big narratives as outside chatter.

“For these guys, we’re a little more than 48 hours from Selection Sunday — that’s way more of a motivation than anything else that’s involved,” he said. “The other thing is, we know who we are, and the second half of that game [at Princeton], that wasn’t us. We’ve proven that over the course of the season. That’s our motivation, that’s what we want to get back to.”

He knows, though, that Penn has only lost three times in the same season to Princeton once in its history: in 2017, when the Tigers were the clear class of the league. They went 14-0 in Ivy play and won the tournament at the Palestra.

This year, Penn, Princeton and Yale took a three-way tie into the regular season’s last day. Princeton and Yale finished level at 10-4 in conference play, with the Bulldogs earning the No. 1 seed by sweeping the Tigers in the regular season. Yale faces fourth-place Cornell in Saturday’s first semifinal (11 a.m., ESPNU).

By the end of Friday afternoon’s shootaround, Jadwin Gym’s big dome might have almost felt like familiar surroundings. Dingle and his teammates were relaxed throughout.

Come tipoff, the mood will be different, and no one knows that better than the newly-crowned Ivy League Player of the Year.

“With the history of Penn and Princeton, even further than our careers extend, it’s probably the best rivalry in the Ivy League,” Dingle said. “There’s a lot of pride that comes with winning this game, whether it’s for a regular-season title, a shot in the playoffs, or just the first game of the year. So we always keep that in mind when we’re playing them. We’re really looking forward to another opportunity to go out and compete, and really show who we are as a team.”

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