Jerome Allen brings a world of experience to his job coaching Penn basketball

Penn basketball coach Jerome Allen was one of his school's all-time greats as a Quakers guard, and he played for some fine and renowned coaches at Episcopal Academy and at Penn. He's also the first Big Five head coach in more than four decades to have played in the NBA, since Tom Gola coached La Salle from 1968 through 1970.

But the lines on Allen's resumé that often get the least attention probably should be in the boldest print. Allen talks about how he was heavily influenced by Dan Dougherty at Episcopal and Fran Dunphy at Penn, and by Larry Brown while playing most of a season with the Indiana Pacers. The bulk of Allen's playing days, however, were spent in Europe, more than a decade - and it was that decade when international basketball pretty much caught up to the American game.

After being on those front lines, Allen is one of the few collegiate head coaches in the country who played for such a long period in Europe. When you watch Penn's offense - including during Friday night's big Palestra battle with Ivy front-runner Harvard - you'll see Euro influences.

How much?

"A lot," Allen said Thursday in his office at Penn. "A lot. I think playing in Europe for most of my professional career, it's changed my mind-set on timing, spacing, overall understanding. It challenged my thought process at first, from playing in the States, in high school and college and the first part of my professional career, where things are attacked a certain way.:

He chose the word attacked purposely.

"Here, the game is athletic, physical, like the stronger team will survive," Allen said. "But in Europe, because the lane is a lot wider, there's more ball movement, more emphasis on the fundamentals, footwork, passing, shooting. The game is played a lot less underneath the rim, for lack of a better way of saying it."

Allen said the top coaches he played for on both continents shared the same traits: a devotion to defense and attention to detail.

"I should be thrown in jail because I'm the biggest thief there is," Allen said, saying he had taken much of his offense from former Penn assistant Fran O'Hanlon's offense at Lafayette, where O'Hanlon is the head coach, and fusing it with NBA and European principles he has learned.

His last Italian league coach, Andrea Trinchieri, offered a Ph.D. of sorts.