M. Hoops doomed by poor play

NEWARK, Del. -- Laughing as he slapped high fives outside the locker room, grinning ear-to-ear as he traced his own line on the box score, Delaware guard Billy Wells made it seem as if the Blue Hens' game plan last night was pretty simple. "Just keep stabbing 'em in the heart, try to keep stabbing 'em," said Wells, who scored 14 points in Delaware's 76-66 win over the Penn men's basketball team. The Quakers didn't give the Blue Hens much to stab at though, playing listlessly. The only real spark Penn showed came during a 7-0 run in the first half that brought the Quakers within three. But Delaware answered with a 9-0 burst of its own, and Penn never had another chance. The Hens led by as many as 20 midway through the second half and coasted to their fifth straight win. Perhaps the best thing that could be said about the game from a Penn perspective is that it means just four non-league contests remain on the schedule for the Quakers, who are now 3-10 overall, 1-10 outside the confines of the Ivy League. On the final play of the first half, with Delaware leading 40-32, Hens guard Austen Rowland tossed up an off-the mark jumper from the top of the key with under three seconds on the clock. While the ball caromed off the rim, the stock-still Quakers could only look on as a slightly built and seldom-used freshman guard from Delaware named Mike Ames snaked through the lane, grabbed the offensive rebound and put back the buzzer-beater. That's just the kind of game that it was. Penn shot 39.7 percent from the floor and 58.8 percent from the line. Behind the arc, the Quakers sank just four of their first 20 attempts before Duane King and Adam Chubb each hit meaningless but confidence-boosting threes in the game's final 21 seconds. Penn coach Fran Dunphy, trying to find something positive, singled out King and Chubb for providing some spark off the bench. Chubb, a 6'10" freshman who saw limited action in Saturday's win over Cornell, scored a team-high 13 points in 26 minutes. King, a sophomore guard who missed the first seven games of the season with a foot injury, made a brief, scoreless appearance in the first half before pumping in a career-high 10 points on 4-of-6 shooting in 11 second-half minutes. But Dunphy was quick to point out that playing free and easy -- King's first three dropped in off the glass, HORSE-style ("He called it," Dunphy said) -- is one thing when you're down 15, quite another in a close game. Still, if the starters struggle as much as they did last night, King and Chubb may soon be seeing even more minutes. Lamar Plummer, who brought a team-leading 16 points per game average into the contest, scored just six points on 2-of-10 shooting. Meanwhile, although Ugonna Onyekwe showed signs over the weekend of returning to the form that earned him Ivy Rookie of the Year honors last season, the power forward quietly scored 10 points and grabbed seven rebounds in 23 minutes last night. Senior captain Geoff Owens, beleaguered by nagging foot injuries, had just one field goal and four rebounds in 15 minutes. Early in the second half, Owens coughed up the ball in the paint under defensive pressure and Wells responded by draining his team's seventh three of the game. For the Hens, that shot sparked a 7-0 run to open the half that buried the visiting Quakers. "I think that [run] was very important to us," first-year Delaware coach David Henderson said. "Because studying Penn, they can play. They're never really out of it. I watched when they played Maryland, they were down 22 points at the half and they got back into it." But the Quakers squad that put the heat on Maryland and took a top-10 ranked Seton Hall team to the wire earlier in the season showed no signs of making an appearance in front of Delaware's 4,980 screaming fans. The applause never seemed louder and the ovation never longer than when the Hens cheerleaders ran onto the court during a first-half timeout. Fresh from the nationals, the championship squad waved a three-tiered trophy over head. The only time the noise level approached that fever pitch came a few minutes later, when stocky shooting guard Ryan Iversen came off the bench to hit his second three-pointer of the first half, putting Delaware up 12 just 17 minutes into the game. Iversen's play was symbolic of the Hens' spreading of the wealth, as last night's win was a total team effort. "This was the best game we've played as a team," Wells said. "But this is probably the best team we've beat this year. [Penn] is a great team." Wells may have been the only one to praise Penn yesterday, as the humbled Quakers headed for the bus in relative silence. Dunphy, whose team is off to its worst start in his 12 years, pondered the shot selection and the shooting percentage and was left scratching his head. "We've got to work on our basketball I.Q.," Dunphy said. "We have some pretty intelligent guys, but our basketball I.Q. is not nearly where we need it to be." At .231, neither is the winning percentage.

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