Quakers Rumble With Solid Defense, Crisp Passing

Penn coach Fran Dunphy has been in this situation before-six times, in fact. After the Quakers handled the Tigers at the Palestra Tuesday night, Dunphy talked about how his team needed to stay focused. After all, they had jumped out to a 7-0 start in Ivy League play and looked unlikely to lose to a member of the Ancient Eight this year.

Five of the six times a Dunphy-coached team started out 7-0, the team didn't lose a conference game the rest of the year. Right now, his team is poised for a similar run.

"Obviously we can't do any better than we're doing right now," the coach said after his team's defense stifled Princeton all night. "But we need to continue this surge."

The Quakers are outscoring their conference opponents by just under 21 points per game and have not shown many signs of weakness to conference foes.

Even against Harvard, the team billed to be the Quakers' most formidable foe this season, Penn dominated, cruising to an 81-68 win in Boston.

After that game, Harvard coach Frank Sullivan succinctly described what the Quakers have been able to do to Ivy opponents all season.

"This was just aggressive, raw-pressure, in-your-belt, get-after-you [defense]," the coach told the Daily Pennsylvanian.

In that game, the Quakers' two staple players, guard Ibrahim Jaaber and forward Mark Zoller, contributed solid performances. Jaaber picked apart Harvard freshman guard Drew Housman for 23 points and six steals. The 6-foot-7 Zoller put up a career-high 26 points, most of which came from beyond the three-point arc.

After Princeton, though, Dunphy spent little time talking about his team's accomplishments. The coach told reporters his team had a tough road trip ahead, facing a struggling Columbia team Friday night and a former assistant at Cornell on Saturday.

"It's going to be a tough weekend on the road," Dunphy said. "I think Columbia and Cornell are going to be more than ready for us. We need to keep focused and need to understand that we've got seven really tough games left. Hopefully we'll be ready and focused for that stretch."

The coach, after essentially wrapping up the Ivy League, is already setting the tone for the remaining seven games. When asked about his team's potentially wilting because of its stranglehold on the conference, Dunphy expressed a sense of urgency.

"You won't hear me say anything other than the fact that if we're not ready to go, we're going to be in deep trouble over the weekend."

"We have to be absolutely focused like you can't believe. And again, these two teams have played us, they're going to watch, they're going to see. We play[ed] a midweek game so they get another opportunity to see us play, so we better be ready," Dunphy added.

Dunphy's players seem to agree.

"I think [we won't be overconfident] because he's not overconfident," Jaaber said. "You can look at that, and he has over 300 wins now and he's still not happy... There's more to be done, I think."

Jaaber may be right, as the Quakers will not go entirely unchallenged. The team still has challenging road trips to Yale and Princeton. Last season, the Elis beat the Quakers in New Haven.