Dick Weiss on College Basketball
PHILADELPHIA– Penn’s 76-72 victory over 21st-ranked Villanova Monday night in the Big 5 Classic can only be described as Palestra magic.
The museum piece on the front porch of the Quakers campus that Michigan interim coach Phil Martelli Sr. called “the best basketball arena in the country.” following his team’s victory over St. John’s in the Garden earlier in the evening served as the perfect back drop for another city series classic where the underdog from the Ivy League rose up to handle the Big East Cats a humbling punch in the face before a crowd of 6,700.
Villanova had dominated this city series competition with La Salle St. Joe’s, Temple and Penn during the Jay Wright era, winning 29 of 30 games from 2014 through 2022, when he retired after two national championships and another trip to the Final Four.
But Villanova is no longer Teflon under new coach Kyle Neptune.
The Cats lost to Temple last year at the Liacouras Center.
And the Quakers got them this season, restoring a semblance of the balance of power that has always existed among the five programs in the six previous decades before Nova’s suffocating run.
This is the only Big 5 game that will be played in the old gym this season. Times have changed. The Big 5 has added Drexel, done away with the round robin series and will instead hold a six- team tournament with two pods that will culminate in a triple header that will be played Dec. 2 in Wells Fargo Arena.
But Penn left us with a memory to hold on to.
“When you get that kind of game, there’s really nothing like college basketball,” Penn coach Steve Donahue said. “This is what they dreamed of, and to walk out here and perform, the campus basically running on the court, it’s why you play college basketball. There’s no better venue in the country.
It was also a showcase for Penn’s newest star, freshman Tyler Perkins from the Landon School in Virginia, who stepped up to score 22 points, grab six rebounds and drew nine fouls, constantly hitting big shots, including two crucial free throws to give the Quakers a 10- point lead with 17.6 seconds to play.
Perkins had no idea about Big 5 folklore when he first arrived on campus.
He wasn’t even born when Steve Bilsky made a jump shot at the buzzer in 1968 to beat Villanova, 32-30, in a slowdown game that that started a feud between Dick Harter and Jack Kraft that lasted for three years before the Cats finally ended a three-game losing streak to the Quakers with a 90-47 victory in overrated unbeaten third ranked Penn in the 1971 NCAA East Regional finals.
But he got to experience it when he hit a huge three in front of the Penn bench to send the Quakers up 11 with 4:02 to play and elicited a deafening roar. “I forget when it was, but it got really loud, all the students stood up,’; Perkins said. “It just got really loud, that’s the only thing I remember. It was awesome.”
Nova added some late drama with a pair of threes to put the lead to two in the final 10 seconds, but guard Clark Stajchert made a pair of free throws with 3.8 seconds to lock up the win. After the final buzzer, the Penn fans on the East baseline, who stood for the entire second half, tossed streamers and stormed the court in a wild joyous celebration.
The Big 5 still means something to Penn. It means less on the Main line where Villanova fans have moved on, concentrating more on the Big East, which has established a history of national championships since its formation in 1979. Most don’t care about making the pilgrimage to this shrine when they can play big conference games in front of 20,000 at Wells Fargo.
But Penn (3-1) gave them a history lesson when Donahue, who grew up in the area, threw up the type of zone that made Harry Litwack, Kraft, Don Casey, and John Chaney famous, taking Villanova out of his shooting rhythm and limiting the Cats (2-1) to 22 of 63 shooting and just 9 of 33 from three-point range. The Quakers shot 51.6 percent, outrebounded the Cats, 39-34, and limiting Villanova to just 10 points in transition. The Cats starting perimeter of Justin Moore, who finished with 25 points; Mark Armstrong and TJ Bamba made a combined 4 of 17 from the three. And Brendan Hausen, their best pure shooter, shot just 1 for 5 from beyond the arc.
Villanova has the pieces to make a run at an NCAA tournament, but right now they are a work in progress as Neptune experiments with his rotation and searches for ways to get Hakim Hart more involved in the offense.
“It was amazing,” Stajchert said. “I’ve been dreaming of this moment for a while. We play Nova every year and they have a lot of notoriety., so you kind of dream to win it here at the Palestra, when our fans show up, to give everyone in the gym this moment, I was really proud of our guys.”
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