Penn clamps down on Lafayette

Lafayette has played games at the Palestra almost since the building opened in 1927. The Leopards played well. They played poorly. They came with different players and coaches, good teams and bad. They even came to play Penn eight times before the Palestra was built. They always left with the same result. They lost, 29 times over the years. Make it 30.

One might have thought it would change after 20 minutes last night. Lafayette shot a cool 65.2 percent in the first half, taking 23 shots and making 15. The Leopards were 5-for-7 from three-point distance. If the offense looked familiar, it should have. It was the same one Lafayette coach Fran O'Hanlon, as an assistant, taught all those great Penn teams of the 1990s that Fran Dunphy coached and current Quakers coach Jerome Allen played on.

"We're not playing that well," O'Hanlon cautioned just before the second half after being congratulated on his team's great shooting. "Penn is very physical."

That won't be said about the Quakers much outside the Ivy League this season, but they did have the bigger bodies against the Leopards. And all those open shots from the first half became contested shots in the second. O'Hanlon might not have known the history, but he knew exactly what he was seeing and had a pretty good sense of what he was about to see.

After trailing by seven points at the half, Penn dominated the second half and won, 74-65.

Offering a tangible indication of how far Penn has come in a year, this was the second time in four games that it beat a team that buried it last season. Penn beat Davidson in its opener after losing by 29 last season. The Quakers lost at Lafayette by 15 last season.

Penn point guard Zack Rosen needed no evidence. He already knew.

"We believe that about ourselves," Rosen said. "I definitely think every year presents different obstacles for different teams, because of personnel changes . . . We've got to build our confidence. We just really have to believe what we do, day in, day out, is enough to win."

Penn runs some pretty nice looking offense, with the slick Rosen seeing things most can't imagine. What the Quakers did not do last season and were not doing this season was playing much defense. And that had to drive coach Allen crazy. When he played at Penn, Allen majored in leadership and minored in defense. This group had been way too easy to score on. Until the second half.

Did the coach mention the word defense at halftime? A few times.